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Update: Planting Seeds for the Future

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About ten months ago I wrote a post about my first effort at growing a plant. I had never even tried it before, so there was a lot to learn — still is. The main point was that in order to reap anything in the future, you first need to plant seeds and tend them over time.

I have been watering, feeding, and tending those jalapeno plants over the winter months. The first day that my wife saw our first pepper was surprisingly exciting. The cycle from seed to first fruit is one of the most common processes in nature, but I hope I never lose the wonder of it all.

I have given away one of the jalapeno plants to a neighbor and still have five. Now that spring has arrived, I am almost to the reaping stage. Those five plants currently have 24 peppers growing and are nearing harvest time. Here is a photo I snapped this morning of two of the peppers on one of the plants:

Early Jalapneos

This experience has energized me to plant more. I now also have growing two varieties of tomatoes and the herbs cilantro, parsley, basil, mint, oregano, and thyme.

A few quick takeaways:

  • If you want something good to happen in the future, you must take the steps today to get it started.
  • You have to stick with it through periods of time when it appears little to nothing is happening.
  • Waiting can be boring.
  • You must continue tending, watering, feeding, and weeding your dream.
  • If you consistently do these things, you will likely have the good thing you desire.

Any experiences you want to share about dreams you have worked to achieve or your experiences along the way? Was your vision and hard work rewarded?

 

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The Myth of the Stress-Free Life

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Have you ever dreamed of  a stress-free life? In this stress-free life there is no one to tell you what do do, how to do it, or when it must be done. You are master of your universe and get to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. This dream becomes most desirable when your boss or someone else with authority puts the pressure on you to perform or face the consequences. Those consequences may include being fired or getting an F in a class. This dream of a stress-free life is very seductive because it tempts you to believe that you can somehow escape the responsibilities of adulthood. Adulthood requires you to be responsible and to fulfill the requests of other people.

My operating assumption is that stress is the normal default condition of life. Consider this:

 Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck

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This dream of a stress-free life can take many forms. One example is a young man I know whose dream is to move into a modest cabin on a ranch and to live off the land. This is an idealized vision of leisure that is not based in reality. Anyone who has grown up on a farm or ranch can destroy this myth quickly. The realities of that kind of life intrude upon the idealized dream. Before I detail some of these realities, I must say that living on a ranch in a cabin and living off the land is a perfectly fine ambition. If that is what you want to do, you can do it. I am just pointing out the reality that it will be full of responsibility. Life always is. To live on a ranch or farm is to trade your current stresses for a new set. This is true because, as Peck says above, life is difficult. This is the default human condition.

My grandparents lived on a farm, and I have recordings of them discussing the hardships they faced. Among the difficulties of life on the farm are:

  • Food. You still have to eat. Perhaps you will hunt your food, fish for your food, or grow your food. All of these require work, and there are deadlines built in.
  • Money. Just because you live on a ranch does not mean you need no cash. You will need to buy equipment, seeds, tools, clothes, gasoline, and any food you cannot catch, hunt, or grow. You will have to pay for your electricity and heating gas or oil. You will have to pay for water or at least drill a well and maintain your pump operation. Also, the government will still require you to pay property taxes on any land you own. Any buildings you own must be maintained and repaired. This all requires money.
  • Natural deadlines. Careful attention has to be paid to the seasons. No boss may tell you when to plant the corn, but if you do not do it at the right time you will not be pleased with the result. Once the corn is grown you must harvest it in a narrow window. That sounds like a deadline to me. In addition, the animals must be fed, and the cows must be milked. Those fish are neither catching themselves nor cleaning themselves once caught. The deer are not shooting themselves nor dressing and processing themselves.
  • Natural challenges. Farmers and ranchers face lack of rain (drought), too much rain (flood), hail, high winds, insects, and weeds, just to name a few challenges.

If you really turn the clock back and envision a time when nomadic hunter-gatherers lived a care-free life, you would find that their lives were not actually care-free at all. If your own well-being is dependent on successfully hunting wild game, your own hunger becomes the stress in your life. If you do  not leave the cave or the tee-pee you will starve regardless of whether or not you have “Leave Cave” in your day planner.

 So What?

Given that there is no such thing as a stress-free life, part of becoming an adult is accepting this fact and crafting a Forward Story that embraces this reality. Avoiding stress is not a realistic strategy. I encourage you to embrace the idea that stress and responsibility are inherent in life. With this baseline realization you can then get around to a future worth living. The Myth of the Stress-Free Life is one end of the spectrum. In our next article we will explore the dangers of too much stress.

What are the stresses in your life, and how do you handle them?

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How to Eat on a Budget

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Market

This relates to our general topic of Forward Story because one realm of life we all have to consider is the realm I call Business. Part of the Business realm is Money. Learning the skills required to successfully handle money takes effort and focus. If you do not care about mastering your money, you never will. My wife and I squandered more money than I want to admit because we did not know what we were doing and because we had developed very bad behaviors.

We recently had a discussion with our college student son about money and about how to create and live on a budget. A budget is nothing more than a spending plan. It is a document that we create to define how much income we expect in a given time period and what we expect our expenses will be in that same time period. Both the income and expense side of the budget need to be as accurate as possible.

In any budget there are some expenses that we know are not going to change. For example, the rent or mortgage is well defined. Your landlord is not going to call you this month and tell you the rent is a different price. There are other expenses, however, that will fluctuate. In our budget we identify several expenses that can fluctuate but that we want to really control. If we do not control these expenses, they will kill our budget and turn it into a fantasy instead of a guide. For these expenses we use a control technique that we learned from Dave Ramsey called the envelope system. Dave says he learned it from his grandmother.  This is one of those cases where “old-fashioned” really works.

For the envelope expenses that we need to control, we go to the bank and withdraw actual cash. This cash gets inserted into literal envelopes with the name of each expense written on it. In our case we use envelopes labelled with the following categories:

  • Food
  • Gas
  • Clothing
  • Entertainment
  • Blow Money

We then purchase these items with cash only, and when the cash is gone we stop spending on those categories Simple, powerful, and effective.

You may be arguing with me about this approach or justifying your other way of doing things. I understand. I resisted as well until I learned the freedom that this brings. Let’s take a closer look at how this works with a budget category that gives a lot of people trouble: Food.

Example: Imagine that you have done your budget for the month and determined that you will spend $450 for food this month. You go to the bank and withdraw $450 (or you may do this on the 1st and 15th of the month and withdraw $225 each time).

This $450 must last until next month. Is this enough money for you?  We will assume 30 days for this month. This means you have budgeted $15 per day for food. In my world that would be very tight. To break it down into breakfast, lunch, and dinner, this means I could spend $5 on each meal. That’s a lot more “value menu” than “gourmet restaurant.”

Actually to me a food budget is neither fast food nor gourmet restaurant — at least not much of either.  Before I share some techniques that help us stay on track, let me say that our goal in food is to eat as healthy as we can while still staying within our budget. We value our health and want to eat good food that we enjoy and that fuels us for life. For us this implies going to the grocery store or market and doing a lot of cooking. I will leave the issue of what “healthy eating” is for another time. I have my view, but there are plenty of different approaches to this.

If you do not cook at home, you are going to have a really hard time not overspending on food. “But, but, cooking at home is hard. ” I know. So is running out of money because you do not cook at home.  Here is the way we make this work.

  • We commit to eating almost all meals at home. We have nothing against restaurants and we do eat out a few times per month. But we simply cannot make our food money last if we are paying someone else to do all our work for us. When you buy food at a restaurant you are paying for many things: the food itself, the labor of the cooks who prepared it, the electricity and water required to cook it, the property costs of the restaurant, the labor of the food runners who bring it to you, the restaurant’s marketing, the insurance they have to pay, your server’s labor, etc. All of these costs can be called “value add.” In other words, you have to pay the restaurant for the value they add to the cost of the food itself. These are legitimate costs, but I cannot pay them constantly and still stay in budget.
  • We plan our meals for the week. In order to avoid restaurants and do our own cooking, we have to do some planning. We use Evernote to plan our meals, but a yellow legal pad will work just as well. We just list the days and dates and determine what we want to eat for dinner each night. We try to plan meals that will produce some leftovers for lunches. If we plan to eat out, we write that on the plan as well for the selected night. One more tip here is that we use Evernote for our favorite recipes. We are constantly adding new recipes to our favorites. This makes it easier to create variety in your meal plans.
  • We build our grocery shopping list from our meal plan. Once we know what meals we are going to cook, we can begin building our grocery shopping list. Again, we use Evernote. We break the list into the general grocery store sections: Produce, meat, dairy, baking, frozen, household, etc. We scan the recipes for the meals we have planned to cook and add those ingredients into the shopping list.
  • We take cash from our envelope to buy food. I take my cash, my iPod with music and podcasts, my pen, and a printed copy of my list.
  • We keep a running total while buying food. My chief objective is to be sure I know that I have enough cash when I get to the register. My little trick for being sure is that as I am shopping and crossing items off my list, I keep a running total of what I have spent so far. If the butter is $3.78, I round it up to $4 and add $4 to my running total. This ensures that the actual cost of the food at the register will be a little less than my final running total. That keeps me stress-free.
  • We learn while cooking. Look, I know that not everyone enjoys kitchen time. My wife and I both do, but not everyone does. One way to transform this mundane task into something useful is to listen to music, an audio-book, or a podcast while cooking. This has been a big help to me.
  • We stay on top of the dishes. When you cook at home, you will create dirty dishes. One of the keys to being able to have an efficient kitchen, and therefore to be able to stay on budget with our food, is to be sure to stay on top of the dishes. Again, I do this while listening to something on my iPod. Between my wife and me, our goal is to have the dishes all washed before we go to bed and then put them away into their places the next morning.

There are thousands of variations on our practices, but I do believe that if you follow this process, you can make it on your food budget, assuming it is at all realistic.

What do you do in order to not overspend on food?

 

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Prepare the Child for the Path

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Train_ChildSeveral years go we bought a little stone tile with a quote etched on it. At that point in our lives our children were still at home, but were nearing high school graduation. We knew the time was short for them to be under our roof and under our control. The aphorism (brief statement of principle) on the tile seemed very relevant to us then, and it still does today. It reads:

Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.

It’s meaning is clear. The path ahead for all of us is uncertain and can be frightening. This includes the path ahead of our children. Our parental instincts are to run interference for them and to smooth the path. When our children are very young, this is normal and required. As our children mature, though, and begin to approach adulthood, it is dangerous to try to prepare the path for them. When Mom and Dad always step in to make things right, fair, and easy, it can give them the false idea that difficulties won’t come. It teaches them that someone else will solve their problems for them. That is irresponsible.

We are at somewhat of a disadvantage culturally when we do not have adolescent puberty rites. In tribal cultures boys and girls did not have the option to remain immature. When their bodies began to change, they were initiated into adulthood through rituals that most of us would find appalling. There was no doubt, though, after the ritual that the boy was to be considered a man and the girl was to be considered a woman. Mom and Dad were not going to run interference any more to keep their children children. I am not arguing that we need to invent puberty rights, but I am arguing that it is the responsibility of parents to grow children who are ready for the path and not afraid of adulthood.

As difficult as it is to do, as parents we must focus our energies on getting our children ready to face life on their own. We should equip them so that they can deal with whatever life throws at them. Sure, if we are still around we can help them and counsel them if they seek such guidance, but they have to learn to deal with life on their own. We will not always be around. Even if we are, we cannot handle their adult problems for them. That is their job.

I have not lived in my parents’ house for over 32 years. They prepared me for the path, and I have functioned as an adult for a long time. I do have to add, though, that while I am no longer under my parents’ control, I am still under their influence. I say this to assure parents that if you adopt the approach I am encouraging, you will raise children that are ready for life’s path, but you will retain your influence. In fact, you will likely have more influence than if you have always tried to control their lives and circumstances. Strangely, children who have been reared in an overprotective way often grow up to resent that level of control and interference.

It is also true that one of the great joys in life is to observe your adult children adapting to life and handling the path they are on. That is when you know you have done your job well and that they will be OK on their own.

In what ways do you prepare your child for the path?

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How Do You View Time?

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Back in 2010 I shared a video that I found to be very intriguing. Since I am writing a chapter in my book on time right now, I revisited the video and found it even better this time around.

I am bringing it back for an encore in this post. There is much in this presentation by Professor Philip Zimbardo that is thought-provoking, but what he says about young men, video games, and education is especially interesing to me.

After you watch the video, I would like to hear your thoughts about the various points he makes about how different perspectives on time can define the way we live our lives and the culture in which we live.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments area.

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Kombucha Guy Loves Kombucha

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It’s Saturday morning, and I am about to head down to our local farmers’ market to stand in a line and buy a product that my wife loves: Kombucha. We refill seven bottles each week. She has a one bottle per day habit.

I am starting to wonder what they put in this stuff that makes it so irresistible. Kombucha is an ancient beverage that tastes a little weird at first, but really grows on you. It contains an active culture called a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast), which is probiotic.016

The guy that sells this stuff is known to us only as Kombucha Guy. I’m sure he has a real name, but we don’t want to know it. We prefer to refer to him as Kombucha Guy because this fella really loves kombucha. He embodies the practice of ABS – Always Be Selling. He can have a line of ten people waiting patiently to refill their bottles and yet he is still singing the praises of kombucha to every person who walks by his booth.

The thing I like about Kombucha Guy is that he really loves what he is doing. As far as I can tell, he is totally sold on kombucha as a product, and he really believes everyone should be drinking it.

It reminds me of one of my favorite poems. In Two Tramps in Mud Time, Robert Frost writes:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation

The idea of uniting your avocation (your love) and your vocation (your work) is the holy grail of career goals. If you are ever able to combine these together, do you ever really “work”?

I would love to hear from you if work and love are the same. What do you do? If your current work is not what you love, what do you think you would love to do?