Freedom

My year has been absolutely mind blowingly awesome. Everyone should have a year just like it. The highlight has been the complete freedom to choose my direction, absolutely any direction. And so I have followed my fancy and explored all sorts of possibilities.

The freedom to choose is an incredible gift. For me, an anti establishment, go my own way kind of guy, it has been a journey filled with joy. There is no doubt, it is an ideal worth fighting for!

Yesterday I dusted off my goals. Yes, those clever things that I set over a year ago. I was rather disappointed to see that even though they have been top of mind, I can tick off very few as being complete.

Have I failed?

After much thought, I believe that stamping my year as a failure would be a rather narrow view. Sure I did not meet most of my goals, but I had a rare opportunity to exercise my own freedom. Perhaps the fact that I did not meet my goals means that I really used my freedom. Hmmm, perhaps that should have been my only goal this past year!

I have spent the last couple of months in a state of mental confusion. A not too unfamiliar territory for me! Having too much time to think is possibly just as bad as not having enough. My mental oscillation has revolved around having had the best year of my life, not meeting my goals, and having no idea about my future. The latter part has been my biggest concern as I am pretty anal about having a plan. Clearly following one’s fancy is opposed to a focus on a predetermined path. I know that now, but that knowledge a little while ago would have saved plenty of mental frustration.

The complete freedom to go where I wanted at any time has been fantastic. Yet, in the back of my mind this ugly thought about sustainability kept trying to percolate through all of the salt water that seems to have seeped in there from the surfing. For all of the freedom that I have gained, I have lost my focus in life! I have absolutely no idea about what to do with myself and now find it incredibly difficult to commit to anything lest it get in the way of my being able to choose something else. Now there is an interesting problem – have the freedom to choose but don’t choose because the choice itself destroys the freedom to choose something else!!!

It is time for me to think clearly and commit myself to my future. Now that I understand the source of my frustration, I think I can move on!

As for all the freedom I will lose, perhaps too much of any good thing is problematic! If you find yourself trapped and dying for freedom, take it from me, absolute freedom is a trap in itself. You and I both need to find the freedom that exists within the choices we make.

Time to Think

It was a pretty long question and went something like this:

“OK, so you gave up your career, your job, your income in order to find a life that you are passionate about. Effectively you have made massive changes in your life in order to add what you feel is real value to the world. When you sacrificed all that stuff, you thought you were going to gain a heap of other stuff. Was the sacrifice that you made really a sacrifice and did you gain what you thought you were going to gain from this change in life direction?”

I suppose the shorter version of the question is; did it work out the way you expected and what now?

To add additional fuel to the fire, my wife and I went out to a dinner party last night. The dinner party was heaps of fun but one of the guys I knew introduced me to a guy I did not know in a way that bothered me immensely. He said, this is Mark, who left corporate life to find a better way and is now back at it working harder than ever.

Oops – perhaps the time has come to do more thinking. Have I really made this incredibly difficult decision to give up everything that is regarded as normal, so as to live the life I always wanted to live, only to end up back where I started?

I now have my very own thinking project. Strangely it excites me that eight months down the line I am in a position to re-evaluate my life and my decisions. Do I continue going with the flow or do I make some more changes to ensure that I am able to add the value to the world that I want to add? Am I on a short term diversion with great long term prospects for my value plan or is it just a diversion? Do I still want what I wanted? What has been good and what not? Did I sacrifice anything or did I just ditch the bad stuff in my life? Where to from here?

Time for me to think and grow and plan and change!

Man, life is exciting! Stick with me as I try and answer some of these questions.