Perspective and Choice

Life boils down to two things.

Perspective … and … the choices we make.

Perspective is that thing that we are all conditioned to have. There are a lot of high-dollar coaches employed to make sure our conditioning is successful and that we hit the field playing the game that we are trained to play.

We choose … knowingly or unknowingly … to play the game.

Us?

We are simply tired of the game. We grew weary of it a long time ago … years ago! We hung in there as long as we could. We gave it our best shot for as long as we could. We could, if we chose, keep hanging in there. We could, if we chose, keep spending ourselves.

But for what?

As I heard one old man say on a job years ago … My babies is raised. I ain’t got to do this!

We ain’t got to do this!

It’s not been easy getting to this point where we are finishing up the final steps in putting the humdrum of the hamster wheel behind us. Something that started as a dream … one born in a life-mix of heart felt desire and the circumstances of these modern times … meant making some hard decisions. It meant walking barefoot through some briar patches. It meant evaluating and weighing a lot of cultivated notions and perceptions. It became much more than a matter of stuff.

It became … and remains … a deeply intimate personal matter of reckoning with our own selves.

Stuff?

It’s just stuff.

Self?

Now that’s another booger altogether.

It’s kind of funny looking back and remembering the expressions on the faces of some of the what we thought were good friends when we initially talked about doing what we are doing … those looks of deep concern and the verbal questioning of our reasoning.

Just how do two people go from living in a 3 bedroom 2 bath house on ¾ of an acre to living comfortably in a 288 square foot cabin in the woods?

The honest truth of the matter is that most people will never be able to wrap their minds around what we are doing.

Another honest truth of the matter is that there comes a point that dictates taking everything you believe is right for your own self and (1) putting it into action or (2) forever living with the felt consequences of yielding to the chains and whips of social pressures.

We chose number 1.

Simplicity and Self-Reliance are achievable through careful deliberate steps. The initial steps are a strange mixture of pain and pleasure. The accumulated steps, for those daring enough to take them, emanate an aroma of freedom that defies description.

Freedom has a beautiful aroma.

Catch a whiff.