Hours Ours
I became a coach as a result of asking myself one question.
I was working lots of overtime then, and going deep in on the concept of Financially Independent, Retired Early, or FIRE.
FIRE says that you can save a chonk of change, store it in index funds, and live a simple life off the residuals ever after.
That sounded great to me, but what it did most of all was show that the rat-race was optional, and that some people had found a way out.
Maybe their way would be mine...
Then I read the question on a blog
"When you retire early, how will you fill your days?"
With the idea of the rat race, a 9-5, a 40-60 hour work week, firmly in place, how many of us think to frame our lives in terms of *how we fill our days?*
The rat race keeps us trying to "use our free time wisely," and we don't even question the implication that our time is not ALL ALREADY for our own free use.
The thing the blog post was actually suggesting was even larger than this--that you can retire early, but you might then find it's *hard not to* make money. You might find that the ways you spend your days bring in cash regardless of the fact that you had planned to live without it.
And possibly *because* you had planned to live without it.
Money loves prosperity, and prosperity, true wealth, is not a matter of quantity of resource but of relationship to resource.
Exquisite relationship to resource draws in resources and keeps them around, like Snow White with the woodland creatures.
Most people's fearful drive to acquire money is actually a deep disrespect of resources other than money. Money looks at our relationship to all our resources when it decides whether to come play at our house.
Most people's obsessive need for money is rooted in their rejection of the experience they want in this moment. They believe they will find the experience they desire some other place, when their circumstances change in some way, but they never learn how to have that experience the only time it can happen, NOW. That future arrives, and becomes now, and they navigate it the same way they've navigated every other now.
The FIRE community showed me this as well, founded in the humility and modesty that grounds all real manifestation--we can only ever have an experience. FIRE asks, how much money do we *really even need* to have a GREAT experience of all that matters in life?
It turns out, not that much, but again, this framing offers us WEALTH and PROSPERITY because it is about our relationship to all that is here right now, and our relationship to the experiences we actually desire.
I began from then on to consider, how am I filling my days? Not just where am I while the day happens, but who am I as I meet the day? How am I spending my time in interactions with others? Am I taking every opportunity to show love and understanding?
I ended up here, in a life of decadent leisure, doing only exactly the things I love the most. Living in a nature paradise, walking where I need to go, having meals and hangout time with friends and family, dancing my face off, being weird in public where they celebrate that sort of thing.
And, of course, going DEEP in with brilliant individuals hungry to take more responsibility for their own experiences of this precious, one and only life. What a fucking privilege.
I write because I can't help it, it is what I do when I have "free time." I publish it and symbiotically nourishing resources roll in.
I can't help it! I have to! I serve no obligations but my own internal mandates.
Life is sweet. My hours are well-spent.
