I have to admit, I’ll never understand suburbia. I get out of my car and I see perfectly manicured lawns as far as the eye can see. I would understand if one or two people had spent a lot of time on their lawns, perhaps gardening hobbyists, people with a fairly obsessive nature, etc.
But every single lawn is perfectly manicured. All I can wonder is , “Doesn’t anybody here have anything else to do? Does lawn manicuring hold such a high priority in their lives that, with all the competing pressures of modern life, they somehow all find the time to pay this much attention to grass?”
Then one of the neighbors comes out and starts pushing her lawn mower across an already low-cut lawn, somehow managing to cut it even lower. This is a lady with children. Is it just me, or is a huge section of society misplacing their priorities? Remember, your priorities are not what you say they are, but rather how you spend your life.
How do you spend your life? What are your priorities?
A father and his son, a young adult, were driving to the cottage. The father was worried, because his son had fallen into companionship with people who might lead him astray, and he was trying to help his son see that it was time for him to take his life a little more seriously.
“Aw, dad, I know you mean well, and I know I’m not really doing you proud, but I like to party. I’ll get on the right track some day. I don’t need to worry.”
They drove a little further, when suddenly the son said, “Hey dad, that was the turnoff for the cottage. You missed the turnoff.”
“I know,” said the father. “I think I’ll just keep driving this way for a while. I can always go back later to take the right road.”
A few more minutes – and a couple turnoffs – passed. The son began to think of the swimming he would miss if they arrived too late. “Dad, the farther you go down this road, the longer it will take to get back.”
The father replied, “That’s true. The further you go down the wrong track, the harder it is to get back. So when were you thinking of turning your life around to head down the right track?”
Where do you want to go? What do you want out of life? Most importantly, what are you waiting for?
As a follow-up to yesterday’s blog post on dying to be happy, I thought I would share with you the lyrics from Tim McGraw’s song, “Live Like You Were Dying”, which just played on Y101 A few minutes ago.Â
He said I was in my early forties
with a lot of life before me
when a moment came that stopped me on a dime
and I spent most of the next days
looking at the x-rays
Talking bout the options
and talking bout sweet time
I asked him when it sank in
that this might really be the real end
how’s it hit you when you get that kinda news
man what’d you do
and he said
I went sky diving
I went Rocky Mountain climbing
I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named fumanchu
and I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter
and I gave forgiveness I’d been denying
and he said someday I hope you get the chance
to live like you were dying.
He said I was finally the husband
that most the time I wasn�t
and I became a friend a friend would like to have
and all the sudden going fishin
wasn’t such an imposition
and I went three times that year I lost my dad
well I finally read the good book
and I took a good long hard look
at what I’d do if I could do it all again
and then
I went sky diving
I went Rocky Mountain climbing
I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named fumanchu
and I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter
and I gave forgiveness I’d been denying
and he said someday I hope you get the chance
to live like you were dying.
Like tomorrow was a gift and you got eternity to think about
what’d you do with it what did you do with it
what did I do with it
what would I do with it?
Sky diving
I went Rocky Mountain climbing
I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named fumanchu
and then I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter
and I watched an eagle as it was flying
and he said someday I hope you get the chance
to live like you were dying.
To live like you were dying
To live like you were dying
To live like you were dying
To live like you were dying
They say that time is money, but it’s not. Time is everything.
No matter what you are doing, you are spending time. You can’t slow
down or speed up the pace of the time you spend. All you can do is
increase or decrease the value of what you get for that time.
If you are spending a lot of your time in drudgery work or watching a
TV or computer screen, maybe you could do something to increase the
value of the time you are spending. Perhaps you would like to spend
more time with people, more time playing sports, more time
philosophizing…whatever you enjoy doing, whatever fulfills you,
that’s how you should spend your time. Because whatever you are
doing, you are spending it, and even where there is a money-back
guarantee, there is no time-back option.
Nothing is truly yours, except your own experiences.
Out here in farm country, I see a lot of signs that read, “This
land is our land; hands off government”. Of course, I know what they
mean, but the fact is that nobody owns the land. “ownership” is a
fairy tale we tell ourselves so that humans don’t harm each other
for use of things.
But the truth is, nobody own the land – not a grain of it. When my
very short tenure on this planet is through, the land will remain.
If I pass down my land to my daughters, someday they too will go. The
land will remain.
But our experiences never leave us. War. Floods. Meteor crashes.
Nothing can take away our experiences. And when we go, we take them
with us.
For my money (Can I call it “my”?), I would rather have dozens of
wonderful experiences that are all mine, than dozens of wonderful
things that never will be.
I can already tell you that I did not get done much of what I planned
to do this summer. I did not plant most of the flower gardens with my
daughters, nor a number of trees I had planned. The weeds made a
mockery of our vacation (“Ha. You think you can just go away and
we’ll wither on our own? No way, we wanna grow!) And all those
hiking and canoe trips? I never even got around to acquiring the
canoe.
But I did have a great summer and I did do a lot of amazing things.
It’s OK for plans to go astray. Do your best to make new plans as
you go, and make sure they are the best plans you can do with your
time. In the end, you will look back with no regrets.
Michele Moore of The Happiness Habit is an interesting blogger. What do I mean by “interesting”?Â
In modern times, this overused and trampled word is a void-filler. Two people lost for words at a conference will say, “Whadaya think will happen?” “Dunno.” “Should be interesting.” “Yup, should be interesting.” “Yup, interesting all right.”
The ancient Chinese had a curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
But when I say “interesting”, I actually mean “interesting”. (Sorry to disappoint you.) Her posts are refreshingly controversial and thought provoking.  Here are just a few examples:
It is this last one that most intrigues me, in Is Happiness for Everyone?, we see a mug shot of a smiling Steve Jobs glaring smugly at the title, as if he knows something we don’t. The question Michele raises is not so much whether happiness is for everyone as much as whether the pursuit of happiness is for everyone.
“For some of us other things are more important than happiness… security, social significance, power, prominence, or perhaps creativity or making a lasting, important, indelible impact or contribution.”
People pursuing power or creativity, for example, are not necessarily unhappy. The pursuit of these goals might be what makes them happy. But the pursuit of happiness might not. For others, the pursuit of happiness is everything. But there is a catch for those pursuing power, creativity and even happiness; one person might be almost completely satisfied with his life chasing whatever he wants to chase, because his happiness is in the chase. Another person might follow the exact same path, but be totally miserable, because his happiness is in the “if only” that he will never catch. If only I had power. If only I could be a little more creative. If only I could achieve this, I will be happy.Â
If only’s never make a person happy. Enjoying the journey, the pursuit of power, the drive for creativity, the gathering of happiness; these are the motors that drive our happiness.
Here is a little something from Jagad Guru Chris Butler:
“In his book Small Is Beautiful, noted British economist E. F. Schumacher wrote:
Insights of wisdom … enable us to see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual. Such a life necessarily sets man against man and nation against nation, because man’s needs are infinite and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.* Â
It is a fact that no matter how much sense gratification a person gets, he will never be satisfied. Material food, material things, material sense gratification cannot satisfy the atma (spirit soul). Just as the body needs material food, so the spirit soul needs spiritual food. To try to satisfy one’s spiritual craving with material things leads to endless consumption, greed, envy, violence, and war. Western people have as much sense gratification as one could ever want, yet they are not satisfied. Why? Because they are spiritually empty.”
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