Stop Planning and Let it Unfold

My mind continually buzzes with thoughts:

What should I do with my life? What should I eat for breakfast? What should I do right now?

Since stopping real estate, I’ve been writing these freelance stories for an online website that will remain nameless but is often derided as a content farm. This means that I write quick, short, hopefully easy stories. If I write enough, it will pay the bills until I figure out my next step.

Figuring out my life’s purpose, for me, has always been tied to a career. When I got sick, I spoke with a social worker who said that some people see their life’s purpose in how they treat people. Meaning, they treat people with compassion and that’s is their life’s purpose.

That’s a nice idea, but I still want to be successful. Trouble is, I still haven’t defined success. Is it money? Fame? Leadership capability? Happiness? I see happiness as an outcropping of success, but not necessarily an end in itself.

And so I ponder: Should I be a yoga teacher? A nutritionist? Get a job as an executive assistant in some job so that I can have benefits?

My mind races and sometimes I feel panicked because I have no idea what to do. When the panic sets in, my mind races faster. I worry that I won’t find a job that I like. That I will never figure out what I’m *supposed* to do with my life.

Then, this morning, I flowed. Silly, normal flow. I was about to make breakfast, but wanted to change. I got the pants I wanted to wear clean from the dryer. Then I realized, “I might as well take all the clean clothes out now and put them away so I don’t have to do it later.”

Oddly, my mind resisted the idea. Just do it later. 

This sounds so mundane, I know. But that’s the point, I guess. Because I had an epiphany —

If I just took care of things as they needed to be done and not in an order dictated by my mind, life would be a state of flow.

During the day, if I blogged when the time came for that, researched potential new stories for freelancing when the time came for that, ate when the time came for that, then these things would take care of themselves.

The mind resists us until we form the habit.

I love getting into a made bed at night. I love looking at a made bed through the day.

But I’m often too lazy in the morning to make my bed. It tortures me every time I look at it as I think, “I’ll do it later.”

For the past couple of days, I started making the bed in the morning after feeding my dog, whose house (kennel) is beside it.

Today, I made the bed without even having to think about it. If we appropriately train ourselves, get ourselves into the habit of doing the things we really want but our minds convince us otherwise, then we can stop planning and let it unfold.

In the meantime, just let it unfold and tell your mind, “shhhhhh.”

Jake the Gangster

My dog the gangster.

Getting Rich

Money.

We need enough to pay the bills. We *need* enough for a few extras. I truly believe that extras are important for happiness. I’m sure spiritual purists would deny that, but why else would we live on the material plane if not to seek material possessions?

In my last post, I talked about how it’s okay to want the Mercedes, but if paying for it is ruling, driving or maybe ruining your life, then it becomes an issue. Preferably, we should be able to pay for extras by doing something we really love.

This book called, “The Science of Getting Rich,” (http://www.xtrememind.com/science.pdf) was written in 1910 and is apparently the basis for the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction, outlined in “The Secret,” basically says that if you imagine something hard enough, want it badly enough, it will come into fruition.

I don’t really believe this, and you can surely drive yourself crazy by wanting something that badly. What the book does talk about that I liked, was that we all deserve material success.

Author Wallace Wattles write, “There is nothing wrong in wanting to get rich. The desire for riches is really the desire for a richer, fuller, and more abundant life — and that desire is praiseworthy. The person who does not desire to live more abundantly is abnormal, and so the person who does not desire to have money enough to buy all he wants is abnormal.”

For those of you interested in this, you might also check out “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill. I started to read this book while in real estate, but instead nearly had a nervous breakdown because I wasn’t getting rich fast enough, so I aborted the mission. I will pick this book up before beginning my next business venture.

The point is there is nothing wrong with wanting material things to enrich your life. 

For the longest time, I really wanted a Volkswagen Jetta. I thought they had the coolest shape, and I don’t know why, but I really liked the cars. When I finally got my Jetta, just looking at it made me happy. Every time I opened the door, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

Of course, it was a 2004 and Volkswagen has ceased to make a good product so my car stopped working and none of the VW service techs could fix it, but that’s another moral and another story all together.

It was hard losing my Jetta when it died. Material things don’t last, but neither do people.

Another quick story: I LOVE my dog. His name is Jake. Sometimes, I get really sad because I know Jake will probably die before I do. I know, that’s horribly morbid, but I’ve confronted mortality a lot in my life, so I can’t help it.

I read in some Buddhist book that we should contemplate the death of things to make dealing with it easier when the time comes. So I allowed myself to contemplate Jake’s death. It made me so sad!

Then, my social worker told me to just chill out and enjoy my times with Jake while he’s here.

It’s kind of like my VW. Just enjoy it and when it goes, let it go. I’m not saying that I loved my VW as much as I love Jake or that a car gives me as much pleasure as Jake.

What I am saying is that nothing lasts. Everything goes away in the end.

So to say that we shouldn’t work toward material things or enjoy material things because they don’t last or bring lasting happiness is false. My car didn’t necessarily make my life richer in a spiritual sense, but it made me happy for a fleeting time.

Isn’t like all about the fleeting moments? Nothing lasts. So just enjoy it while it does.

Money = Happiness

I always used to joke that cancer made me shallow — and it did in many ways. I now watch the Kardashians with uninhibited fervor, along with the Housewives of both Orange County and Beverly Hills. When I have extra spending money — and sometimes even when I don’t, shhhh — I visit the mall or TJ Maxx and go wild.

My fiance laughs and wonders where his “little hippy” went. The little hippy railed against realty television like a plague infecting society and eschewed money and shopping as morally bankrupt. (As a note, my fiance is not a hippy. He is a jock.)

It changed after I got cancer. It’s hard being sick and racking up thousands of dollars in bills. I wanted to take that money and go on a nice vacation. Instead, I was making payments to the medical clinic that saved my life.

I decided being overly serious was as detrimental to life as being overly materialistic, and decided to let loose and go shopping.

I quit my newspaper job and got my real estate license. I’m going to make TONS of money, I decided. First, I’ll buy a Mercedes. Or maybe a Lexus. Then, I’ll buy designer clothes, sunglasses, some sparkly jewelry, maybe a rhinestone collar for Jake, my dog. I’ll buy a vacation home in Hawaii, where I lived in a tent on an organic farm after college, and take a month off from working my butt off every year to stay in it. That’s balance. A month off. Can’t wait.

Only I couldn’t handle real estate. Realtors work 24/7 — and even if you take Sunday off, it’s hard. Realtors must work under licensed brokers while they drum up leads through cold calling, door knocking and calling expired listings. Some brokers give you leads, others don’t.

If you get leads, you have a better chance of making it in the business, but then you’re not really working for yourself because your broker shoves a stick up your butt and prods you to work more, do more, say more. If your broker doesn’t give you leads, then your phone doesn’t ring and the money is much slower to come in. Some people might be able to take that. I didn’t have a big enough nest egg. And, I was stuck on my $500 a month COBRA insurance because the Realtor association’s insurance wouldn’t accept me because of my illness.

I almost had a nervous breakdown because I never stopped working. But I need money. I want my Mercedes.

I calmed down, decided to try getting a job in the administrative portion of real estate, as a transaction coordinator who schedules home inspections and organizes contracts. The company where I applied convinced me I didn’t have the right training to be successful. I could be an agent with the right training.

So off to the races again. Calls, calls calls. Door knocking this time. Same training as before. Still doesn’t feel right. Gosh, I want my Mercedes.

Then I realized the company convinced everyone who applied for that position that they could succeed independently with the right training. The office manager discussed pulling more “bait and switches” to build the office.

I went from holding people’s pants to the fire for lying to working with people who went out of their way to misrepresent reality in order to get what they wanted. Not okay in my book.

I grew tired. Tired of working hard and not making ANY money — even enough for bills. Tired of jumping to respond every time an e-mail came through. Tired of talking people into things as salespeople must do.

I’m tired. No more. I quit. So ends my real estate experiment. It lasted four months. No I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Money isn’t evil. Wanting money isn’t evil and wanting things isn’t evil. But when the desire for material goods builds too much and makes us act out of character, do things not innate to our true selves, is when the trouble begins.

Stay mindful of your desires and make sure that they come from you instead of controlling you.

Confession

I admit: I am a slob.

I don’t clean or vacuum as often as I should. My bed often goes unmade all day and I have (gasp) gone entire days without showering.

But I never made a correlation between my outer slovenliness and my inner lack of direction until reading, “Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul” by Deepak Chopra. Deepak says that we can free ourselves from feeling like time is the enemy while maximizing our health, wellbeing and therefore happiness by maintaining a schedule of sleeping and waking, keeping ourselves and our environment clean and avoiding procrastination.

I’ll also admit that I was going to write this post a couple of days ago — but then I put it off.

Duh, Suzanne.

I used to live in a small Arizona town and work at the local newspaper. I was very unhappy while living there because I dislike small towns and ultimately disliked my job. But I kept a regular routine. I woke up, ate my oatmeal with a chopped apple and honey for breakfast, went to work, came home, did yoga, made dinner and went to bed before repeating the entire routine.

Once I moved to Mesa, the routine disappeared. And my diet changed. I began eating eggs and a bagel for breakfast. This made me gain weight. I also abandoned my nightly yoga routine because I couldn’t get in the groove of a new schedule and I got lazy. This contributed to my weight gain and also made me anxious, stressed and depressed. (Yoga really helps me deal with my emotions.)

The thing about a routine is that it ensures all your desired activities can fit into the space of a day. As a free spirit, I often think, “I just want to play it by ear,” because following a routine is somehow akin to death. But I think Deepak is right. A routine creates order in your mind and helps free your spirit because it feels some semblance of predicability.

Looking back, perhaps it’s no coincidence that I began to feel like my life was out of control. I abandoned my routine and failed to find a new one!

Welcome to Happy

Just what is this elusive thing we call happiness? The gurus call it a choice, but achieving this lasting state of bliss is more complicated than just deciding one day, “I want to be happy.”

A bit about me: I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 at the age of 27. I went through chemotherapy and surgery and have been clean (I hope) since December 2009. I have a gene mutation known as BRCA 2, which makes me more susceptible to all kinds of cancers.

On bad days, it’s easy to dwell on this. But much of the mind/body research says that keeping a low stress life with a positive outlook combined with eating healthy and exercising can reduce your risk of disease — whether you have a gene mutation or not.

Women with the BRCA 2 mutation have over an 80 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer. That’s high — but it’s not 100 percent. I asked one of the doctors at Mayo Clinic what makes those lucky women different. He attributed it to lifestyle factors — managing stress, sleeping and eating well and generally taking care of yourself.

Many doctors will say that’s phooey. And you can believe whatever you want. But even if having a positive outlook has no effect on elongating our lives, at least it will make life that much more pleasurable.