It's All About the Choices We Make! It's true. There's no getting around it. Generally speaking, the way we end up is all about the choice we make in life. Now certainly there are some cases where, as the bumper sticker says, "Things Occur", but for the most part the course we choose to take along life's path lead to conclusions that we help form.
So what are some of the choices we make in life that have major impact on our path toward simplicity? Well, there are a lot of them, and most of them are well within your control. Read more...
Dan's and Vanessa's Combined Topic: It's All About the Choices We Make Most things in life boil down to the choices we make. Grant it, there are many things in life that we can’t control, but most things are the result of choices. So...disclaimer up front...we’re talking mostly about adults here. Sure, kids have choices too, but as Vanessa and I were discussing this topic she reminded me that when it comes to things like education and opportunities, some kids don’t have the support systems as others. What’s normal for one child may be completely foreign or unavailable to another. I think she nailed that so we’ll keep our discuss limited to adults. Heck even adults have constraints on some of their choices, but like I said “most things boil down to choice”...not all. So, disclaimer done...this is more about introspection and choice we make ourselves as individuals, not judging others’ choices...let’s move on. But just because we choose something, doesn’t mean we get to choose the effects or the ramifications of that choice, too. Our choices have natural and sometimes inevitable effects. Some choices are causation for things down the road and not just correlation.
When we choose to buy things beyond our means using credit, the consequences are merely delayed. But we will face them down the road. We borrow from our tomorrow. For some reason we believe in the future we’ll have more time, more money, more resources...but that’s not always (or usually) the case. Poor credit choices today are literally writing checks that our future self has to cash...or face the ramifications for. I have to ask myself, “Does stuff make me THAT happy that I’m going to bet money I don’t even have yet on it?” I don’t think so!
The Choices We Make That Effect Our Path Toward Simplicity What we do for a living: This is often the result of a series of choices we make, not a single decision. A brain surgeon doesn’t just choose to be a brain surgeon one day. It’s a series of choices that likely began in high school or before. When our parents told us we can “be anything we set our mind to” that didn’t mean we could decide it and then it would happen. We had to make lots of decisions along the way. Sorry, but the “Law of Attraction” only goes so far. It takes the right choices, and working hard to support those choices and enable follow-on choices. Like when you play billiards or pool, the best players plan their shots to set themselves up for the next shot. Where we choose to live: Now, we’ve mentioned that dream home we had been planning but thankfully we decided to change that choice. We saw ourselves working just to support what we thought would be our dream. The more we contemplated it the more we realized the home would own us and not the other way around! Here’s a portion of a comment we received recently from Dayis on Episode 29 that reinforced that for us: "Becoming a slave to your dream home – how I wish you were speaking to me a year ago! We moved into our “dream home” last summer and it has become a nightmare…so hard to keep up with its needs, which is now the focus instead of the desert beauty that surrounds us. Hard to find time to just sit and enjoy the views. After your podcast, we’re confident that selling our home is the right thing to do. And thanks for sharing the fisherman tale…it so wonderfully defines what we want to achieve.
