Two Plus Two Older Archives - Creating meaning in my life

"vn post. Just out of curiosity, do you think you'll be this way the rest of your life, or do you see yourself going back to the corporate world again someday? "

That is a mighty difficult question. I suppose the simple and honest answer is: I don't know. My instincts tell me the shift is permanent. Certainly specific aspects will flex if or when I decide to have a family, or perhaps as rising health care costs require either more money or a decreased comfort level.

The principle that I would refer to as a general response would be: I will always do what I perceive to be in my best interests. Given my particular life experiences, parents, educations, and so on, I presently believe that happiness and peace are the best things for me to create in my life. I also believe that I have the ability (read: am learning the ability) to manifest in my life those circumstances and choices that offer me maximized peace and happiness, when I consciously make the effort.

The challenge for me, and I would imagine for most people, is to maintain that level of energy and focus that is required to manifest good situations in my life. In my particular case, given my particular likes and wants, I need to go out to parks, events, and parties regularly in order to keep meeting new people. This takes quite a bit of energy, and the return on my investment is often spaced out quite far (5-10+ outings to find truly meaningful friendships, variance is a bitch) so I have to maintain a level of faith that my continuous effort pays off. Similar to "the long-run" in poker, I stay focused on the goals of peace and happiness and then at any given moment try to make little choices that lead in that direction instead of away from it. It is often very easy to tell which decision leads towards my goals and which lead away, the difficulty lies in maintaining enough presence to care enough about getting what I want. Lazyness can be the largest impediment to this, often because my mind plays tricks on me, like "you don't need to brush your teeth tonight, you have been really good about it recently". Weird "logic" that sometimes does manage to persuade me. So my big goals of peace and happiness yield a meta-goal: Each time a small choice arises, leading either towards or away from the big goals, try to choose the option that I will be happy and peaceful towards [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] In other words, using the teeth example, I try to choose the option that I can't argue with - I know that if I just go and brush my teeth I will be happier (more self-esteem, less dental bills, more will power, and so forth).

So tying this all back into the original question "do you think you'll be this way the rest of your life, or do you see yourself going back to the corporate world again someday?", I will only return if the sum of the choices I encounter each inarguably lead me there, and those choices are themselves imbued with peace and happiness. So my instincts say "no" because I can pretty clearly remember the types of ingrained beliefs I had to undo to finally leave that world. For example I would have to choose someday that I would prefer to get up early and go to bed accordingly (something I have never, even in school, been able to enjoy). I would have to choose to spend the majority of my time at an office, rather than with my friends/wife/kids/pets/etc. I would have to choose to allocate the planet's resources towards wealth creation instead of towards increasing biodiversity and health.

I made those types of choices easily when I was on autopilot from a finance education, but now that I understand the consequences of those choices... why would I choose to do something that brings me unhappiness and dis-ease?

As an aside, I appreciate all the feedback I have been getting on this stuff, it has been very useful for me to put down in words some of the stuff that is floating around in my head. It also has made me feel much more connected to the community around me to know that some other people are thinking about this too.

-Eric