Yesterday, I sat around a table with two of my good friends. I'd done one of them a favor, garnering me a drink on their dime. The other had done me a favor, and acquired a drink (and a cookie) as a consequence. The best part of all that? No one was keeping score. Doing a favor for someone is the best excuse to spend time with that someone. My grandma keeps promising to make me a pie for helping her with my computer. I don't care if she ever does. She has 41 Grandchildren, and helping her with her computer gives me unfettered access and time with her.
Those minutes are of incalculable value.
There are only three treasures worth procuring in this life. Relationships, the experience that comes from Travel, and Education. These are the only things that have a chance of enduring beyond this life. They are those things which we garner by the purest acts of our agency.
On Fathers Day I'll be doing a red-eye trip to Salt Lake with my Dad. Hopefully, we spend only an hour or so in Salt Lake before turning around for home. The best part about traveling, is the getting there, those moments where we have nothing else to do but contemplate the universe. I suppose the destination should be filed under education when cataloguing our experiences. Regardless, it's best to have a good attitude about being trapped in a car for 10 hours.
So much of what we do in life is waiting. What we do while we wait is just as important as whatever it is we're waiting for. There is a lot a good iPad (shameless plug) can do to help with that, but there is something to be said about starting a conversation with random folks in line with you, writing a song on a napkin, or having a great thought you share with no one.
I'd like to think I was a fountain of sensible advice.
Be careful.
Look before you leap.
Save every cent you can.
Don't hurt anyone.
Be as boring as possible.
That advice taken liberally by yours truly has resulted in acid reflux, general anxiety disorder, and seven years of time spent doing things that wasn't writing my books. Basically, my ability to analyze the risk/satisfaction ratio of a given course of action was crap. If I couldn't see an almost certain benefit, I wouldn't do it. I garnered the means to exist, while denying myself any motive to do so. I had multiple creative outlets, but none that embraced my true passion.
Thus:
Party like a rockstar.
Armor up and leap.
Money is a means to an end only.
Hurt anyone that threatens what's important to you.
Grant yourself something to look forward each day, each week, and next month. Thinking much further ahead than that is just dreaming.
Make sure you dream.
I hope you have a great trip on Sunday! Thank you for your words of wisdom...and yes, you are a fountain of sensible advice!
ReplyDelete"Armor up and leap." That's going on the list of potential tattoos.
ReplyDelete(You are likely the only one who can appreciate the strangeness of this, so here it is.) So, speaking of dreams, and father's day, I dreamt last night that I was hanging out with my dad. It was the week before he would retire, leave behind the red leather couches of his workplace (yeah, it wasn't real, go figure) and take the rest of his life off. Strangely he had made some sharp departures from the dad I had known. He had taken up smoking and also purchased a horse, named it Christina. Even though I knew it was not real . . . that the details belied the absurdity . . . I still got to spend a couple of hours with the old man and when I woke up, somewhere between slumber and waking, I wept. Then we went to the farmer's market and had some tacos. So amen to relationships, experience, and education. You don't really appreciate a road trip with your dad until you have to drive alone.
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