Deliberate Living- Designing Your Own Life (and why it matters)

Deliberately Showing Up.

Life is for the living and in life, if you are not living, you are dying. I am absolutely dedicated to creating a life worth living for myself. A life which allows me the luxury of time and space to do with as I please and to work when I want to, on projects I care about, spending my time with people whose company I enjoy. A life where money flows with ease and relationships are treasures. I am creating a life where I design my purpose with God's blessing, to honor everyone that came before me and didn't make it as far and to remind those that come after me, to take the slow road, to check the map, laminate it, hole punch it and place it in their planner, because maps are useful creatures and SatNavs often lose connection with satellites.


I am writing these notes as a guide to those who seek the same things in life. This blog is dedicated to all those who understand this writer's simple desire to travel the world at a moment's notice and have a life so streamlined and effectual, that she could, with a phone call from the first class airplane seat, notify the current house-sitters that "the packet in the third drawer on the left side in the office desk will be picked up by the accountant on Thursday" and could then easily pull her eye mask down, plug in some ambient music and relax, knowing that every thing has been taken care of to the fullest degree of self actualization. This blog is about deliberately being the best you and tracking those experiences by:

1. Identifying the various important portions of your life, 
2. Turning them into palatable projects (modules)
3. And understanding how to manage those modules through small but permanent lifestyle changes, resulting in a self-actualized and deliberately designed life. 

So Why Does Designing A Deliberate Life Matter?

Without an objective view into our own lives, we are bound to live it based on the needs and pulls of others, rarely to our own benefit. Even at our best, during a given day, the internal monologue machine leans on being highly critical instead of highly inspirational. Inspiration is sought out on occasion, filling a well that often satiates others but leaves us very little for our own inspirational thirst. All the retreats and holidays in the world can't make up for an unfulfilled life and when it comes to living, fulfillment is the first need that is set aside for more practical gains, like salary or vacation time. 

Which reminds me of a story: A business executive find himself working 50-70 hours a week. He gives up time with his family, time for himself and his well-being to ensure the company moves forward with its mission. In fact, the company offers him 3 weeks paid vacation at the end of his 10th year instead of the regular 2 weeks. Overjoyed, he takes his family to an all expenses paid, island getaway. On his last morning there, the business executive decides to talk a walk out onto the rocky cliffs, overlooking the pristine water. He notices a local selling fruit juice, made from the fruits collected under the very tree that was providing him shade, the local had a makeshift sign that read: Fifty cents a cup.

The business executive chuckled to himself, walked over to the native and said "Why don't you charge more money for your juice? You could make more money per cup."

The native responded "Why do I need more money?"

The business executive retorted "So you can pay someone to stand here and sell fruit juice while you take your family on vacation. It has taken me 10 years to get to a point where I have sold enough product so I can have the money I need to bring my family here. Don't you want that for yourself?"

The native blinked once and said "I have that already. We just wake up here in the morning."

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness. 

-Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now

The Way We Live

We are perpetually thrust into conforming around the world's schedule, those of us caught living in the Occident. We imbue our lives with to-do lists, pilates schedules, work routines, hydrating events (yes, I heard it referred to as an "event") and various time mismanagement set-ups that focus on simplifying overcomplicated lives by overspending money we overwork to produce in order to pay the bills that allow us to complicate our lives ad nauseum.


While the process of simplification, a noble process at that, is seemingly an aggregate of our conscious minds' ongoing to-do list of things to...do before we die, we discover that no one ever writes: "Pilates 3:00-4:00, hopefully I'm still alive then." We assume, in linear fashion, time will speed up or slow down proportionally based on the scale of exciting to boring events we've either planned to go through willingly or exposed ourselves to, in order to get one step closer to death. Really.

So if this is a zero sum game, this life, why bother planning at all? Is it, hurry up and get x-much done before we buy the farm? Or is it, hurry up and get the boring bits done so we can sit and relax before we buy the farm? Or is it, hurry up and get it done because we are buying the farm and want the kids to have the keys before we go? Either way, the farm is getting bought! Assuming we are channeling our inner Aristotle and we want to examine our lives to make them worth living, are we then in fact, examining or lives through planning or merely beating the battle rhythm of what life presents us by writing down the unfortunate events that will eventually lead to our demise?

What if we decided to extrapolate the concept of planning into modular blocks of life, which, upon desired arrangement, offer a blueprint of how to live vis a vis how we are living? What if we made our life's purpose creating a systematic approach to arranging the chunks of limited life into a rearrangeable order such that we left behind legacies of how to best live life a-la ( insert your last name here)?

So, how is this blueprint to be captured? Do we use paper systems that can get lost, stolen or damaged to capture our information or rely on digital systems that can be lost, stolen or damaged? Part two of this series will discuss Analogue vs Digital formats. For now, let's err on the side of using analogue systems. That is, systems that do not have an on/off switch-Paper Planners. Any brand will do! Some brands to consider are Filofax Personal Organizers, Day Timer, Franklin Covey, Gillio, Midori Traveler's Notebooks and Moleskine Notebooks. The whole point is to find a system that can be streamlines, duplicated and integrated.

My suggestion is to set up a planner and deliberately begin designing your life.

Where Do I Start? Start Where You Are.

There certainly must be areas of your life that are working, areas where things are flowing as you would want them to be. These are the modules of your life that may need tweaking every so often but you've figured them out. Perhaps you just want to track these areas. Creating an entire planner for finances, when everything is flowing right, might be a bit much. However, tracking finances as a tab within a planner would be a logical conclusion.

Why not begin with an area of your life where you have a complaint? An area that has a pattern of showing up in ways that are not pleasing to you. Pick that one. That's a good one. Yes, the one you just thought of and said to yourself "Why would I ever want to bring THAT skeleton out of its closet?" That's the very one we are talking about. Let's shine some light on the bugger. It's not like anyone else is going to see him.

In case you haven't picked up on life's many secrets yet, here's Life Lesson No. 1: Life will continue to teach you the same lesson until you get it. So, if you are experiencing a repetition of problems or patterns in your life you would like to stop, consider this to be a "module" for you to work on. Create a tab, label it with whatever you want to call it, e.g., "Healthy Eating" and start focusing your attention on everything that rings true to your senses. If it "feels" good to think about a subject, continue to focus upon it. If it doesn't, don't.

Where are all your important phone numbers listed in case your phone is ever stolen?