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This week has been pretty long so far with 10-12 hour days every day and a few mornings where my daughter decided to wake up between 3 and 5 am. Last week was similar and next week I will be traveling 4 days for work and net getting home until after midnight Friday, if things go well that is. 

I see this phase of my work life as foundation building for the next phase and even though nothing is certain, at least I feel that I am moving in somewhat of the right direction, something I was missing in early life as it was more about subsistence living. Day after day, hand-to-mouth existence is not what I consider a great life in the modern world, even if that was more the lives our ancestors lived. 

These days, it isn't possible to live the life of an urban hunter gatherer long term, and with a family it becomes even more difficult. For the life of today, the only real way to create some form of stability is through ownership and that comes through *earning* what is held. 

https://i.imgur.com/2ImaScz.jpg

I have always worked hard in my life and got my first job at 12, a cash-in-hand gig cleaning out newly built houses before the surface tradies came in to paint and fit. The work was hard and I did it alone, bu the money was good for a kid. I sometimes think back to those times in the early 90s and wonder what the difference may have been if I understood ownership and started building a foundation then. I am quite certain that things might have been different. 

There is no point in lamenting past decisions as none can go back and live again, yet it is possible to learn from it, although I never really did until much later in life. Once I worked it out and started, life played its next hand and decided to increase the level of difficulty, kind of like a new level in a game that would ask more of me, and then a bit more. 

>The only way to know potential is to fulfill it. 

I have come to recognize that regardless of how things go, I am relatively well equipped to deal with it and take the weight of necessary. Last week at work there was a seminar talk on dealing with stress, but it was in Finnish so I couldn't attend. The science seems to back my position on stress though, it is only bad if you think it is bad. 

I have always considered stress a necessary component of learning as development is change and therefore takes some form of energy, resources, work. To be good at something, one has to continually stretch and reach for more challenge so that the skillset improves to meet, exceed and then face the next and greater challenge. Again, this is much like any game one might play, although the stakes are higher. 

I have also gone through various stages of life and come to the conclusion that life doesn't matter that much, so why not take some risks and create a great one. So many people seem to look to minimize the amount of work they do and I do the same, but I think the difference is that one can give up on work, or improve to do it better. For me, the space I create through improvement I try to allocate to either improve further, or add some other process. Again, if I had taken this habit when I was younger, I would likely be in quite a different life position.

But, this is the path and yesterday's steps brought me to where I stand today. While thinking of different choices made and different paths, knowing what I did at the time with the resources I had at the time, all I could do is do the same again. What that means though is that I can use the gains in knowledge, skill and resource going forward to build and design something better, without keeping on the repetition. 

https://i.imgur.com/QMhwCOk.jpg

Repetition is not only habits playing their part, it is comfortable. Doing the same thing over and over again is familiar and due to this feels natural, like it is what we should be doing or what we believe is all we can do. Familiar is a limitation of the mind and if familiar isn't a process of improvement, it is a physical limitation also. 

>No matter how many goals we set or our hoped and dreams, repetition is going to defeat us.

You might know better than me, you might have it all worked out in your life, but if not, perhaps you should have a look in the mirror and see that it is your world that you have created, your universe in which you live. Your experience and your actions have got you to where you are in this life and while it might not be where you ever saw yourself or ever wanted to be, it is where you are now. 

>You can blame the world, but someone else in your shoes would have done different, because they are not you.

When I imagine the decisions I made in the past and alternatives, the alternatives were never available to me, as me in that moment. Someone else with a little more knowledge, a little more skill, a little more understanding, a little more luck - might have made some small changes that would have fundamentally altered the foundation upon which they may stand today. 

>Someone else might have fallen with no foundation at all. 

While I work as hard as I can to do what I think I must and fulfill my personal potential, the most important thing to own in this world is the responsibility that is our own lives. Without ownership of experience, nothing is ever owned. 

>But all of us in this life are living on rented time and eventually, we all get evicted. 

How we live matters. If only to me. 

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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