While we talked with Cassidy, the lady in the window seat, we got to chatting about the sacrifices she made to further her career. She’s worked since she was 15. The job takes her where the story is, even if it’s after 5pm on a Friday and halfway around the globe from her family during the holidays. We all commiserated over fighting for opportunities & respect, how the career becomes the life and that the Either / Or between the two isn’t a choice in her world. Or ours.
She asked us if we had heard about a few developing international news stories. We heard of the first few but not the last one. We confessed we had been working on bettering what content we consume. Less Prime Time television and more BBC World News. She cheered us on while filling us in.
Re-drawing the fine line between between Entertainment & Pacification
Katie & I having been trying to keep to a few rules to prevent ourselves from entertaining our lives away. Here’s my first draft of what I can recall:
- If you don’t feel like you are livelied by what you’re doing, don’t do it.
- If you’re feeling more pacified than excited with what you are watching, don’t watch it
- Don’t watch TV to go to sleep. Sleep, or read. Or draw. Or code…
- If you are sacrificing your diet now when you could eat something healthier a little later on and be okay, wait
- If it’s not incredible, it’s shit. Quit f*cking around with it.
- Wake up each morning and physically call the day out. Challenge it to a fight.
- Quit keeping score. Only corporations can take it with them because they can go on into perpetuity. The rest of us have only a finite amount of time.
- Don’t be afraid to take account of your resources. Family can be left with your resources. Don’t be afraid to keep track of your assets.
- Your most precious resource is time. It’s constantly depreciating at an unknown rate. Don’t forget to give most of it to your family and friends or they won’t hold on to anything you leave behind.
- Reincarnation has no practical value: no one really remembers if they get to go back and try again. Live your life as if you only have one. Besides, this moment is all that matters. No sense taking such a chance with your life.
- Sleep on stolen time.
and probably a few more rules
These are ways, so far, we’ve uncovered what we need to learn, discover who we need to meet, and find the next adventure or few.
The more we accomplish, the more we see how small and connected the world truly is.
So it seems. It even feels that way tonight while we’re spending the back-half of our holiday nestled in a quiet fishing village along the Pacific Ocean up in the Northwest Oregon Coast. If we can feel that way in a one stoplight town that lives off the land, we can feel that way anywhere.
Though it does scare me that if this is the case, that we might never again begin to truly disconnect and recharge.