Chapter 12. Creating journeys for the next “best” of your life

Chapter 12.   Creating journeys for the next “best” of your life

“At every moment, we have more options than we can imagine…”

                                                             W. Mitchell

You no doubt have many times heard the phrase, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” At a National Speakers Association Winter Workshop in Honolulu in 2002, Jim Cathcart past national president changed to quote to say…

“Today is the first day of the “best” of your life.”

That statement brought much applause from his audience of professional speakers and trainers, many who do motivational speaking to help people create the best out of their lives.  The statement hit me as meaningful, one to write down and think about.

Motivational in spirit and sincere in its meaning I believe it can be rephrased once more time to fit the future creative journeys you will take in your life.

“Today is the first day of the ‘next best’ of your life.”

You may have already achieved good to great things you may no longer be able to better at your age and in your physical condition.  You may be past your physical prime.  Your coordination or dexterity may no longer be as sharp as it once was.  You may not be as handsome or pretty as you were when you were young.  These all represent real limitations or conditions of human life. 

You can trim down.  You can exercise and strengthen muscles.  You can learn new skills. 

At the same time changing conditions of life do not mean you and I still do not have many more “bests” or “greats” yet to accomplish in our lives.  You can write books and articles.  You can write and give meaningful speeches.  You can coach.  You can mentor.

You can use the skills and strengths you have while gaining additional knowledge and skills and use them to create new ‘bests’ for ourselves.

What are some of the “bests” you would like to accomplish?

Write a song?

Write a book?

Write a poem or book of poems?

Write your life’s story?

Run a 5K or 10K or perhaps a marathon?

Climb a mountain?

Visit all 50 states?

Plant a beautiful garden?

Raise prize winning vegetables?

Learn to take professional quality photographs?

Learn to paint in oil, acrylics or watercolor?

Build your next home?

Start a business?

Develop new friends?

Travel around the world?

Learn to figure skate?

Complete a college degree?

These are all achievable goals, creative journeys.

One life lesson I have learned is to start with achievable goals then push and reach for higher and higher levels.  To write a book first right an article

The first step is to choose your destination your goal.  The second step is to gather information.  The third is to begin planning.  The fourth is to begin collecting resources.  The fifth is to gather the support system and people you will need for your journey.  The sixth is to draw up your map.  The seventh is to begin.

Sounds so simple.  Yes it does sound simple.  In most cases it is just that simple.  The challenges come from the amount of work you may need to do.  Some journeys may require a great deal of information gathering.  To learn to paint a full wall size mural may take years of painting lessons and painting to develop the skills.  It may take weeks and months of painting an hour or two at a time to complete it.

One of our ever potentially present challenges is losing the confidence and drive to keep moving when things seem to be going bad or simply go bad.  Catastrophes, tragedies, disasters do happen at all scales.  I’ve told you of some of mine already.  Getting through and past such negative things often will require a great deal of support and courage or simply hard headed stick-to-it-ness, the determination that no matter what you are going to complete your goal.

One of my biggest challenges in life is that so many of the things I wanted came too easy.  More effort, working harder, longer would probably have gained me greater results but I usually acquired what I wanted without having to work that hard.  Persistence is one of my traits or skills.  If I am committed to accomplish something I will persist.

One of my negative traits is periodically striving for perfection, or setting my goals or standards too high.  Then after fighting to move ahead and/or procrastinating until it is getting to the point of being too late or impossible to complete my task or project I finally sit down with a pencil and paper and I write out all of what really needs to be done and discover that I can actually get it done if I back off on my impossible standards.  Then I move ahead, complete the task and end up frustrated because I have completed it finally yet at a level I am not proud or happy with.  I got by, just got by once again.

My college degrees were all like that.  Getting my architectural license was like that. 

I am catharting, dumping negatives from my life.  I am not writing anything that will be of value to anyone who might buy this book.

Bests.

What do I mean by more bests in your life or my life?

Choosing projects you have not worked on yet. Choosing goals you haven’t accomplished yet.

Suggesting that you examine bests in your life so far and listing them.  Review them and decide which do you think you could and would want to better now.

In my case…

drawn cartoons

drawn cartoons like famous cartoonists

I have excellent hand and eye coordination

I can mimic or copy what I can see

publish cartoons and a cartoon strip

have my drawings put on display

write a play and have it performed in public

write short stories

write mysteries

design houses

design buildings

design logos

design graphics

design signs and sign systems

design advertisements

lose 30 to 60 pounds

travel to 44 countries

travel/visit 49 states

speak to over 2100 audiences from 1 to 750+

write many articles

get articles published

write some books

have a book published

publish a book

find a wonderful, beautiful, very loving and sexy wife

have two great sons

have a great daughter

develop a garden and decorative yard

create my creativity room

refinish rooms in my house

teach at a university

become a licensed architect

teach in Cortona, Italy

travel all around Europe

travel around the world

speak in foreign countries

become an officer of GSA

become a toastmaster

complete CTM, ATM, ATM-bronze, ATM-silver

complete my NSA-CSP

speak at NSA events

speak in GSA speaker schools

speak in GSA showcases

speak for AIA

been on radio talk shows

         Athens, Taccoa, Springfield, over phone

drawings in a art fair

win a prize for my drawings

designs on exhibit

25 foot long cartoon on exhibit in Cortona and in Athens

what could be some of my new bests

create new programs

create a new speech

create audio tape/cd series

write new books

complete this book

write articles regularly

get on a television talk show

draw new cartoon characters, cartoons, cartoon strip

write a play

write stories

write mystery novels

be a main platform speaker at an NSA Convention or Winter Workshop

do more concurrent sessions

publish more articles in the Professional Speaker magazine

learn how and create a beautiful garden

complete my creativity room

create artwork based on my travels, life, learnings

read more books

learn how to do interior gardening

generate much more business

speak more around the world

take more regular trips around the world

speak in every one of the 50 states in a single year

develop new friends

find someone new to love who loves me

trim down to 160 - 170 lbs

These are all mostly achievable, doable.

If I chose them as journeys, gathered information, planned and implemented my plans and work on them consistently most to all of these journeys would be accomplished.

What about your journeys, goals, targets?

personal

physical

professional

family friend related

civic or social

religious

The sun is shining. You are healthy.  You have enough money in the bank to pay your bills for a couple years if you didn’t work at all.  You have enough work already scheduled for the year to pay your bills and allow you to travel to several places and provide you lots of open or free time.  You live alone.  You have no real obligations except what you choose to agree to do.

This describes a life situation that would allow free choice of traveling with minimal restraints.

Yet I feel trapped, stuck, unmotivated.

Am I only happy when I am moving, busy, traveling, working on some project?

Am I depressed or simply bored?

I have been in 49 of 50 states and in 44 foreign countries, a dozen or so of them more than once. My work involves me traveling.  I extend my work trips to include vacation or travel time.

Your life is probably mostly controlled by your work and family obligations.  Most of 168 hours each week are probably spoken for by your varied obligations.  You would have to sacrifice a great deal to simply walk away for awhile.

I don’t have to sacrifice much if I walk away.  My son is 31 and supports himself.  My daughter is 29, married and they both make very good incomes and live very comfortably.  I have no contact with one brother.  I have whatever contact I choose to have with my other brother and they both live 1500 or so miles away.  Both of my parents are dead and have been for 30 years (mother) and 25 years (father).  My oldest son was killed 13 years ago when he was 20.  My wife chose to end her pain and her life almost 4 years ago.

I am simply me.  

My life is mine to create, to design, to plan, to live, to enjoy.

What I choose to do is mostly up to me if not almost 100% of the time.

You have to involve other people, several other people probably when you make choices in your life.

Are you making enough choices in your life to satisfy your personal desires, wants and needs?  Or are you only making or able to make a minimum of choices each day, week, month, year?

I lead a strange, unusual, creative, wandering life.

I am paid for talking and saying mostly anything I want to say as long as my talks and workshops fit into the categories that my clients are willing to pay for.

I would love to be able to simply talk about what I want to talk about and still know I could generate income to pay my yearly expenses and provide extra money for the later years in my life.

Let’s look at your life.

Draw up a weekly calendar or schedule showing all 7 days.  Start with Monday on the left.  Draw up 7 columns and then divide them up sideways into 24 rows.  Put the earliest time you wake up at the top of the chart.  7, 7:30, 8 and so forth.

Then take a set of color markers, preferably transparent colors, pens that are used for highlighting words and sentences in books.  You may want to write notes on the chart and the transparent colors will allow you to.  Choose one color for work, one for sleep, one for family, one for friends, one for you.  So you’ll need 5 colors.

Start by marking in the times you sleep.  Then the times you work.  Include the time that you have spend traveling to and from work.  Then color in times you spend with members of your family whether all together or not.  After that mark in times you spend with friends alone.  If you spend some time with friends and family then use both colors when you mark those time areas.  Finally mark the times that you spend with just you no matter what you are doing that has nothing to do with any of the other categories.  This may be time exercising, working in your garden, hiking, hunting, fishing, reading, doing hobbies, etc.

show a sample of my life

show a couple samples of typical people, day shift, afternoon or evening shifts.

include blank pages with charts on them….one for the first, one for the ideal, one for planning a more creative life.

Now turn to another blank life chart and use the 5 colors to create your ideal typical week.  This is not a vacation or holiday week.  Create your ideal week.  Imagine you have won a lottery or inherited a very large sum of money and can now completely control your life.

chart work

Now compare your two charts.

What would have to happen for this to become your normal week?

1.  win a lottery?

2.  inherit money?

3.  quit your job?

4.  wife or husband would have to get a much higher paying job

5. 

6.

7.

8.

This list of reasons may be enough to make your “ideal week” seem impossible right now.

Do you think you would be happy for years living your “ideal week” each and every week, week after week after week?

Now turn to another blank life chart and block out a more workable while still more like your ideal week.

What would need to change? 

Less sleep?

Less work?

Get a job closer to home?

Work from your home?

Change working hours from 5 or 6 days to 4 longer days or possible 2 long days like some hospitals offer their weekend nurses.  They work two 12 hour days and are paid for 40 hours.

Find someone to do those chores around the house that fill your free time?

Drop some of your civic, social or church activities to free up time for you by yourself, with just your wife, with your kids, with your friends?

Some of these are doable and many people choose to do them to take back control of their “life journeys”.

Between 1962 and 1966 I worked freelance, part time, half time jobs whether going to school or not.  Once I graduated with my Architectural degree I began working full time.  From then I went to over time to moonlighting to working full-time in one firm, part-time in another and also moonlighting.  Throw into that mix going back to school at night.  Except for nine weeks while I was unemployed due to a career choice I made on my own, when I was trying to move from architecture to advertising, my pattern was to work, work, work and go to school.

That was a pattern I continued until 1976 when I was laid off from my full-time architectural and graphic design jobs (both with the same firm) due to the depression in Florida of the 1970s.  For the next 14 or so months I tried to run my own architecture and design firm.  I saw no other options.  Most architectural firms had cut back, way back, many had closed up.  I was separated from my first wife, living in a completely furnished one bedroom apartment that a business friend had arranged for me to live in through one of her and her husband’s friends.  She and her husband then offered space in their building for my first architectural office.  They allowed me to move into without any guarantee I could pay rent.

My life began to change, change dramatically.  I would begin to wander.  I would begin the greatest and most creative journeys of my life to date.

I didn’t know how to get clients.  I had a diploma, two diplomas.  I had passed the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) tests and had become a licensed architect in both Michigan and Florida two years before.  I had some left over graphic work to do that came from the firm that I was laid off from.  Enough to give my soon to be ex-wife some money each week to pay her and my son’s bills and barely pay mine.  Some times I couldn’t pay my own. 

I was working one day a week as a volunteer teacher of gifted children at my sons’ elementary school.  I was a soccer coach of my youngest son’s team and had never played soccer.  I was the coach of my oldest son’s football team and had never played on an organized team or league.

I was keeping busy.  Always busy, morning, noon and night.

I remember one night after I had had to move out of the apartment because I could no longer pay the rent and was sleeping on the couch in my warehouse space office.  It had 4 concrete block walls that I had painted white before moving in.  It had a bare concrete floor covered by a mosaic like carpet made up of scraps of carpet I had collected, scavengered from dumpsters when I was making a similar one for the classroom I was working in with the gifted kids on Tuesdays.  The ceiling was the underside of bare double tie precast concrete sections that made up the roof: structure and ceiling.

That night I was lying in the dark thinking that after all that had happened to me, mostly none of it my choosing, there was nowhere but up now.

Somehow I made it through that time.

From the concrete warehouse space I moved into a beautifully decorated ex-bank board room with 4 walls of walnut paneling and wall to wall plush carpeting where I would pay no rent.  Instead of rent I would provide architectural and advertising services to my friend, who was the minister of the church that then owned the old First National Bank in Boynton Beach.

Wandering through my days, one after another, with no real destination or plan just trying to get by and gain control of my new life I met several new friends who helped me out. 

From 1976 to 1978 I began my wandering journey through life, consciously knowing that I was then wandering.  I took each day as it came.  My days became filled with various meetings that hopefully would lead to work that included Chamber of Commerce committee meetings, luncheons, Kiwanis meetings, cub scout meetings, classes I tried to teach at the middle school at night, community appearance or building board of adjustment and appeals meetings to simply meetings with people who I was told to meet about potential work.

During that time my father died, October 1976.  Unknown to me he had left insurance money and some savings that was divided up equally among my two brothers and I. Before Christmas I had money in the bank and no longer had to worry about how I would pay my weekly or monthly bills, at least for a couple years if I was conservative in how I spent the money.

Why did I share that piece of Alan history?  Simply to demonstrate that life often is not what we plan but rather what happens to us.  The important life lesson is that “life isn’t so much what happens to us, it is what we do when things happen that matter and end up creating our lives.”

14 separate and different negative to catastrophic things happened in my life from the Spring of 1976 to June of 1977 and totally changed my life forever.  None of the 14 things did I choose or plan.  They simply happened.  The night I was lying on the couch in the dark I decided that with all that had happened me I was still alive.  Several more would happen in the months to come.  A short while after that night thanks to my minister friend/client I moved into a little 2 bedroom rental house that his bishop owned.  I lived there until I left for Europe in June 1977.  By then I had acquired some work and my brother had sent me a portion of the inheritance money that would help provide me a buffer for a couple months.

None of these things were planned.

They happened and I worked at trying to make them work for me.

What has happened in your life?  What have you done to turn the experiences and their results into benefits for you? 

Now back to your new creative journey.

What are some of your dreams?

world travel

owning a race car

acting on a stage professionally

sending your children to college

going to college to finish a degree

building a new home

adding onto your current home

How do you need to alter or redesign your weekly life chart to help you accomplish and fulfill some of your dreams?

My life and the lives of many people I have met or have read about have proven to me that we can greatly control and affect our life journeys.

Now it is time for you to design your next creative journey.

Start by thinking about what you want your life to be like 5 years from now.

Imagine you are waking up on a Monday 5 years from now.  Describe in detail what you wonderful life would be like then.  If you have had a very difficult life so far this may seem completely fanciful or pretend.  Perhaps your dreams are more practical than other people who will read this book.  That’s fine.  Start from where you are.  Where would you really like to be?

Write it down.  Describe the ideal day for you five years from now if everything went as you want it to from now until then.

Then make two lists that describe your life.  One list describes it as it is now.  The second list describes it as you dream it to be five years from now.

Once you have completed your two lists compare them.  How distinctly different are they?  What will be needed to make the second one happen compared to your current one?

More money?

Greater health?

Some one to love

No debts

Land

a new job

an education

I did this type of thing a few different times in my life.  Because of my tendency to be a wanderer through life and not a very precise and persistent researcher I have rarely take much time to analyze the current lives I was leading nor the dream lives I wanted to lead.  Because I have tended to be a loner most of life and depended mostly on myself I never gathered a group of friends or my family often to work out plans.  Nor have I ever looked for specific, perfect workable predetermined plans or tours that would lead me to where I wanted to be.

Instead I would dream.  I would write my dreams down in my morning or night time journal that I have kept off and on since the mid 60s since I read about the benefits of doing that in motivational, self-help books.  Then I would think about my dreams often most days when I walked to the beach, to my office or sat having a meal.  I kept my dreams in my head and my heart.  Periodically, often sporatically when something would happen that might effect the outcome of my dreams I would act and move closer and closer toward my dream or dreams. 

In the case of my first wandering trip to Europe I had dreamed about going to Europe since high school, a fact my mother mentioned at my first wife’s wedding shower that created problems for me with my future wife for awhile.  I had forgotten the dream.  After I had been married for a couple years and we had moved to Florida I became obsessed with going to Europe.  Every time I saw anything in my architectural magazines about working in Europe I would think about it.  Then I became aware of the Rome Prize, an architectural prize that provided 12 months of living in Italy to study architecture.  I applied for it 3 separate times and was not accepted.  When the final check came from my father’s estate I decided to fulfill that long time dream and take a trip on my own to Europe. 

Many hours and days were often filled for the next 5 months with planning, research, thinking and talking about my 3-month tour of Europe that I would live on in June.

With a list of the cities I would travel to and tour on both sides of a sheet of yellow legal paper I boarded a plane with my Euro Pass, a line of credit, a back pack, a couple travel books, including Europe on $10 a Day, I took off.  The first week or so I traveled with Kwok-Yee (David) and Mindy Wong as I mentioned before.  Early one morning on our train ride from Mainz, West Germany towards Lucerne, Switzerland I ended up taken off the train by a train conductor because he thought I was a most wanted or simply because he was accusing me of smuggling 100 rolls of slide film and 50 audio tape cassettes.

That night after resolving that unexpected challenge I was roaming the streets of Lucerne looking for David and Mindy unsuccessfully.  I became so frustrated and desperate that evening I invited myself to sit at a table with 3 people speaking English that I had over heard talking for awhile.  They turned out to be 3 teachers at the American School in Lucerne.

That night I began my first true journey alone in a foreign country.  Nothing was familiar. Nothing would be the same again for weeks or months from day to day.  I would sleep nearly 100 nights in strange beds and eat nearly 300 meals or more mostly alone in one of 22 different countries.

I would learn to survive, 

to live, 

to creatively journey and 

live on my own without any of the protective people and support systems 

I had known the previous 33 years of my life.