living like you're not going to get another chance

I've been reading a lot of blogs lately about voluntary simplicity. Incidentally, I came to these blogs initially through my research of bicycle touring in the US, mainly through adventuresinvoluntary simplicity.blogspot.com. You should check it out and follow some of the links, but only if you have a bunch of time to kill because I can't seem to get much else done now that I have all of these blogs to follow. Anyway, voluntary simplicity, in a nutshell is about downsizing your lifestyle, your footprint, if you will, not because you lost fifty percent of your net worth in the housing bubble implosion, but because, for one reason or another, you think it's the right thing to do. In case you are wondering, I think it is the right thing to do. I may go into my reasoning for that at a later time but that is not what I have on my mind today. What I have on my mind today is a recurring thread in all of these blogs. The catastrophic reminder of how short and fragile life is.

One thing I've noticed about all of these writers writing these blogs, other than the fact that a lot of them live in vans (not all of them live “down by the river,” though) is that some awful occurrence caused them to simplify their lives. Often it was the death of a loved one, sometimes a significant other, other times a parent, occasionally just an acquaintance. This usually lead to a revelation of, “what if today was my last day, would I be happy with where I am?” Evidently the answer was mostly “no.” Not all of them came to this realization through death, though. Jack from Adventures in Voluntary Simplicity, for instance, woke up one morning and realized that he was an asshole. It could be anything, failure of a business, dissolution of a marriage, loss of a job. Anything that causes one to take stock of one's situation. Which is an interesting phenomena in itself, the fact that most of us are so busy going through the daily motions that we never have time to wonder why we go through those motions until some calamity give us pause for long enough to think about it. It makes me think that maybe we should periodically review these things, even if nothing awful has happened to us, and make sure that the path that we are on is a good one.

Steve Jobs said it pretty well when he said that he likes to look in the mirror every morning and ask himself “if I only had a short time to live, would I spend time doing what I'm about to do today?” If the answer is no for enough days in a row, then he knows he has to change something. Sometimes the change he makes involves cheating the organ transplant system, but that's beside the point. The point is, he asks that question. Everyday. I'm joking about the organ transplant thing, I have no idea what went down with that and I certainly don't begrudge anyone a working liver. There are the shareholders to think about too. I mean, really, the guy was obligated to keep himself alive for the sake of the shareholders, right? Oh-oh, I feel myself being pulled into a rant here... must resist... whew! I'm okay now, sorry about that. Anyway, I gotta go look in the mirror and ask myself some heady questions.