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Charity Vs. Gift

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Charity vs. Gift

Photo Attributed to flickr user AlicePopkorn2

While speaking to a friend of mine, we started discussing the difficulty of accepting money or gifts from others. We aren’t big earners compared to the rest of the crew we hang out with. So the discussion always comes down to what can we afford to do with them and what do we have to skip. We aren’t going to go travelling to Europe if we are saving up for a trip to South-East Asia.

We aren’t going to go out to a fancy restaurant with them if the meal will cost our whole day’s pay. There are other examples but the main idea is we have to choose. It isn’t lack of love for our friends or the inclination to spend time on our own. We just do not have the funds to spend on the number of activities our friends choose to take part in. If choosing between paying bills, saving up and going out, we are definitely going to choose the former two.

Sometimes our friends offer to pay for our meals, and some other trips. It is done out of the graciousness and generosity of their big hearts. They want us to be able to enjoy as much as they do. Because they love us, they offer to pay for us. But my friend and I were discussing how we have such a hard time accepting gifts from our friends. We think of it as charity and as pride cometh before fall, we refuse to accept any charity. We are too good for it in our minds.

The reality is that we should let our egos fall back in such cases, and consider anything that anyone gives us as a gift from the universe. The universe/God/Allah/Ram, whatever you wish to call the higher force, wants you to have fun. The universe is there to take care of you. It wants you to be healthy, happy and filled with joy. It isn’t there to judge and bring you down. It is sending you a message through your friends and family that you need to be taken care of for a little bit.

Accept the gifts that are coming your way in any shape or form. They are there because you deserve them in some way. Do not let your ego pull you back into thinking this is charity and you do not deserve it or you are too good for it.

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You Are The Poorest Among Your Friends

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You Are The Poorest Among Your Friends

Photo Attributed to Thenix

Why do we always feel like the people around us have more money than us? If you asked anyone of your friends how much money do they think you have or they have compared to others – they are always going to over-estimate how much money you or their other friends have, and underestimate their own. We are poor. Others are rich. That is the consensus. Why do we not see the reality? Everyone is not richer than us. Everyone is not poorer than us. Some might be richer, some might be poorer. But there is no generality that can thrown at the status of the people around us.

Maybe I have an inferiority complex with this sort of thing – but I always believe everyone around me makes more money than me. Significantly more. I make a meagre 40K in the bowels of Toronto, and I consider myself to be one of the ones who makes significantly less than the people that I know, that I meet on the street, in my yoga classes. The reason I think this way is simple. I compare my inside life to their outside life. I know how much money I have, and what I can do with it. I cannot buy Lululemon workout clothes by the boatload, if I wish to erase my debt. I cannot go on random one week vacations to Puerto Plata, if I wish to save up for the Big Trip. I cannot have a really nice, new, shiny car, if I wish to pay off my mortgage faster. The list goes on.

But I do not see the insides of the people around me. I only see their Lululemon workout clothes, their fancy cars, their fancy furniture and downtown apartments, their pictures on FB of the vacations they have been on, etc. I do not see their debt, their stress about their debt, the paycheque they get every month, the money they have to borrow from friends or family, them having to give up on something to have a nice car, and so on. I do not see their inside life, but the outside life they portray to the world.

Do you do the same? Are you comparing your inside life to their outside life and lamenting about the unfairness of the situation? You are probably not the poorest of your friends or the richest perhaps. But looking at the life portrayed on FB or to the world is never the best way to judge the people around you. If you are going to have an honest conversation about money with them, then maybe you will be able to figure out what the honest truth is. Until then, try to base your assumptions on reality.

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Your True Hourly Wage

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Your True Hourly Wage

Photo Attributed to Thenix

The concept of exchanging your time, your precious seconds, for dollars is a common one. We have been taught this concept from the very beginning of our lives – from the doling out of money for chores, to part-time jobs in high school, to the full-time gig almost all of us are in. We are exchanging our very precious resource – our life energy, our time, our seconds. I wanted to share something from a book ‘Your Money Or Your Life‘ on the concept of life-hours.

Let’s start with a fictional character – Tina. She is working as Marketing Director in a company – where she earns 80,000 CAD a year. Presumably, if you calculated her hourly rate – it would be 80,000 divided by 1920 (the total number of hours you are supposed to work in a year – 40 hours a week times 50 weeks). That comes up to 40 dollars an hour. That seems like a pretty penny. She should be proud.

But, let’s dig a little bit deeper. She doesn’t actually work 40 hours a week – that is a minimum in her company, but she ends up putting in about 60 hours a week, sometimes more depending on the projects that are due. That reduces her hourly salary to $27 dollars an hour. Still pretty good – you say.

She also spends 2 hours every day commuting to and from work (70 hours a week). Sometimes more in snow storms, sometimes less if she works late into the night.  Adding that into the mix – her hourly rate reduces to $23 dollars an hour.

Let’s add in the number of hours she spends taking her children to daycare, purchasing business attire for work, and buying fast food as she’s too tired to cook. Let’s add this all up to maybe 7 hours a week (77 hours a week). That reduces her hourly rate to $21 dollars an hour.

Finally, let’s add in the number of hours lost weekly due to stress, illness due to overwork, depression, unhappiness, lack of motivation, not living one’s life dreams and other ailments – this is just an estimate. I estimate that at 4 hours a week (81 hours a week). That reduces her hourly rate to $19.75 an hour.

Think about it – you are working a stressful, high-paying job because you are earning money directly proportional to it. But when you come down to it – taking out all the fat from the equation – you are actually earning the same amount of money as someone who might be working a less stressful job, but who works from home, doesn’t have to pay for day care, or deal with anxiety or stress related disorders.

Calculate your actual hourly rate and figure out how much of your life you are giving away for pennies on the dollar.

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The World Doesn’t Need More Successful People

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Mountains of Mendoza, Argentina

Photo Attributed To Thenix

There is a quote by author David Orr, from his 1992 book Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World:

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

I find that this quote speaks really well to the Minimalism movement – as we are all individuals who have given up the traditional route of being deemed successful and have moved on to other ways to defining our success. We do not need the big cars, or houses, or the thousand pairs of shoes to be regarded as successful. We have realized that beautiful experiences and stronger connections define us as successful. We realize that a life filled with traditional tenets of success, like money, power, fame, stuff, is empty. It reeks of discontentment. It stutters and stammers its way to depression and anxiety.

Why are we doing the things we are doing? Even though sometimes it’s hard to tell the non-minimalists in our lives, that we can’t do certain things as it isn’t something we are interested in anymore. Even if it might mean losing acquaintances, friendships, and even family relations. It makes us realize what is important and what isn’t. We are moving towards living the life we are meant to be living on this planet. It doesn’t allow for faltering or mistakes. It is clear-cut and it marks a clearly marked path towards peace and contentment.

The decision is yours. You have to choose between love and life. Between contentment and constant dissatisfaction with every aspect of your life. Between stuff and minimalism. The path and choice has always been yours. Now, it’s easier to choose the path of minimalism because there are so many of us out there and so many of us ready to support you.

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We Are An Undependable Generation

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Beach Tel-Aviv Israel

Photo attributed to Thenix

I do not do what I say. That is what Thenix accused me of over the weekend. At first, I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe that I am being accused of something so base. I believed that I was a person of honour, but that was just another story I had built up in my head. I was a flake, and I ended up cancelling on more events/dinners/things than I could reasonably make an excuse for. I am the queen of excuses. The weather, fake grandparents’ illnesses (all my grandparents are dead), my own illness (real or fake), lack of time, lack of energy, lack of money, and so on. They have been overused in my repertoire.

When I first moved to Toronto, I would get to appointments, and work early. At least 15 minutes early if not more. I was always punctual. People could set their clocks by me. I noticed that I would wait sometimes hours for people to show up. They would almost always be late. I ended up ‘wasting’ a lot of time just sitting at coffee shops, and bars, waiting for my friends to arrive. It made me realize we are a generation that doesn’t show up on time to anything. Even the time that you start at work is considered to be open to negotiation every day. Sometimes you are ten minutes early, sometimes 20 minutes late. In your head it all balances out. I began showing up late to events as well, knowing that if I showed up late, I would still be earlier than others.

Until Thenix showed up in my life. He is always late to events, but no matter how late, he will show up a 100% of the time. In addition to being late, I had started making a habit of cancelling on events. I don’t show up. I make excuses and I stay at home. I realize that more and more, now that when I organize an event, people text me at least 3 times to ensure the event is still on. I have taken on the culture of my peers, but in the absolutely wrong way. I need to change otherwise I am going to start losing respect in a lot of people’s eyes.

This change will come slowly in me, but I do not think it has even begun in our generation. We are still behaving as if we are the rulers of time, and we can do as we wish with it. We are not teenagers anymore, or even young adults. It is time to start behaving like the serious movers and shakers that we are meant to be. We are going to awaken this universe, but we can’t do it, if we are late or if we don’t show up.

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Countercultural – Working for something other than money

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Thenix and I were having a conversation about work and how right now it seems we are only working for the sake of working – in order to make the money that we need to make – in order to create a lifestyle we want to create in the near future. We do not do it for the love of it, the passion of it, or the joy of it. We do not completely abhor or despise our works – we still enjoy certain aspects of it – we still enjoy some parts of the work – but currently it is mostly for money.

I said, there must be people on this planet who like full-time work. There must be. I mean, I cannot believe for a second that there are people out there who go out 9-5 every day and do not enjoy doing that to themselves, and not just for the money that they make out of it, or the promise of a secure future, for themselves and their children. In every job, there are certain aspects of boredom. Every job has its dull moments. Even if it is your dream job.

The concept of working for something other than money is so counter to our culture, that the concept might seem foreign to a lot of people reading those words. It just doesn’t make any sense, when you have been fed the same myth from the beginning of your precious life. The myth that you are nothing without money, you need lots of it to survive, and you need to start as soon as possible. The unfortunate thing is that you are never going to have enough money. The concept of enough doesn’t ever enter any normal human being’s head. There’s always more where it came from and therefore, there is more that you have to go out and get.

If you pare down your wants, as most of our needs are met adequately with enough food, water, shelter and relationships, you will find that you will not need as much money as you think you need to survive. Everyone of us has this number – an amount of money we have in our heads. The amount of money we think we need in order to retire comfortably or even to live comfortably. Usually it is an arbitrary number you pulled from the air, because you have no idea how much money you need to live. Most people come up with a million dollars as a goal. It seems high enough that you could survive on it, but low enough that you could possibly reach it through the lottery or long-term saving.

The exercise of going through the numbers and figuring out the real number will help you realize you need less than you realize, and maybe motivate you to pursue the number, in order to start working for love, light and happiness.

Past and future equals suffering

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Photo attributed to Thenix

Photo attributed to Thenix

Every single time we are suffering in any way, shape or form, we are suffering due to the boundaries set by us due to the past or the future. We are either berating ourselves for the past, or dreaming about the future, and all of that removes the possibility of contentment and peace. Removing the past or the future from our constant thinking patterns will help with that suffering. Being in the very difficult present moment is the only way to do it.

But the present seems boring. It is sterile. It doesn’t have drama associated with it. The past is dramatic. It has a storyline, it has climaxes and emotions. It is more interesting than the present. The future as well is mesmerizing. It has no boundaries. It can be anything that you wish for it to be. You can be a superhero, a villain, a millionaire, a movie star, anything you wish to be. You can create it in your head.

The creations in your head are dangerous. The stories we tell ourselves are dangerous. Do you know why you do the things you do?  It is because of the stories in your head. You tell yourself things like this; you are good at bowling; you are bad at languages; you are going to happier once this year ends; you are going to be sad once your vacation ends; your life will end if your relationship ends; your life will begin once you get married; you will be ecstatic once your debt is paid off; your life will be amazing once you get a higher-paying job; you should haven’t dated your ex; you shouldn’t have gone to university; you shouldn’t have taken out student loans; you shouldn’t have travelled for a year; you shouldn’t have spent your money on clothes.

The stories are endless, and none of them are real. They are not the reason you are unhappy in the present moment. If you really think about it, if all of the stories in your head were different, you would still be in the same position, lamenting about the past, or dreaming about the future. It is only when you take control. Take control of your thoughts and emotions that swirl around in your head. You are in charge. Not some piddly past, or some weird future. The only person that matters is you. The only thing that matters is your happiness.

Everything else is peripheral.

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Selling out your soul

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Photo attributed to Thenix

Photo attributed to Thenix

Yes, it is Christmas Day and this seems like a rather dire topic for such a day. But I feel like I have the time today, due to the fact that I do not celebrate Christmas and I have a day off, to think over such important issues. If you are not going to think over such issues right now, when will you?

Thenix bought up the issue of selling out your soul a few days ago, and I needed to let it percolate in my head for a bit, for what it means to me. Why do I go from day to day doing what I do? When I worked at Intuit a long time ago, I would go into work, everyday feeling a little bit sick. I had an amazing job there, easy, no pressure, amazing boss, great benefits and salary, and great prospects. Everyone loved me, and wanted me to grow in the company.

If I had stayed the prospects to move up in the company were a surety and the prospects to earn oodles of money a definite. But still, I went in feeling dead inside. I felt like I was selling out my life, soul, precious time, and everything else, for money and a chance to be Director of something. My boyfriend broke up with me, thank the lord, and gave me the extra push to declare enough is enough. I started planning my first long-term trip then.

The problem of course is that, not everyone has the opportunity to get up and leave. People have families, responsibilities, obligations, and other various items holding them back, mostly in their heads. They have a million excuses why they cannot start up their own business, or leave their current job for something better, or change something in their life to improve certain aspects of it. They can think of a million reasons why not, and maybe one reason for why they should.

The thing people forget and that I forget from time to time is the limit that they have on the amount of time on this planet, and the amount of energy that their souls have to keep on reminding them. The time thing is pretty self-explanatory. Everyone knows that they do not have an unlimited amount of time on this planet. Everyone knows that, but they do not remember that.

The other thing they forget is that after a while of soul-sucking time on this planet, your spirit will eventually give up. You will lose that verve inside of you, that little voice that encourages you to do something different. You will lose any inclination to move on and upward. You will not care anymore, and will drown your sorrows in shopping, alcohol or something else.

Are you selling out your soul right now? What are you doing about it?

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Putting Fun into the Budget

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Photo attributed to flickr user jurvetson

I have been really good for the past few months, with the result that I have been able to put extra money into my credit line. I’ve been ahead of my budget. Instead of keeping to my budget as-is, I’ve shifted things around, so I have set higher, more challenging goals for myself. I said to myself, if I could put in X last month, I can put X+500 next month, and so on.

The result? This month was an expensive month, as I had to purchase leggings, as mine were holey and losing hope. I also have had to purchase a yoga class card, in a downtown studio, as I am no longer teaching yoga, and need to start paying like a normal studio visitor. Whatever the reason might be, I realized on pay-day that I am going to a bit behind my extremely pushy goals.

I felt sad for a few hours. I tried to tell myself, the goals have been made to push myself, and even if I reach three-quarters of them as I did, that is pretty amazing. I talked to Thenix about it and he said something about fun.

He asked me why I didn’t have anything in my budget for fun or something wildly indulgent. I said, surprised, I do, have something for fun. I have my yoga classes, and grocery shopping, which is fun for me. I love to cook.

That doesn’t count, he said. You need something that is wildly indulgent. Something that you would consider a luxury that you wouldn’t consider buying for yourself. Money isn’t only about buying necessities, it is also about pampering yourself. Some examples would be, clubbing, going to a restaurant to eat, a new dress for no reason, a facial, etc.

That seemed somewhat a foreign concept to me. I thought to myself, if I spent money on something indulgent, instead of putting that money into the credit line, I would feel very foolish and ignorant.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, that fun is an important part of the budget that I have been missing for the past couple of months. Without it, life just becomes about day-to-day forward motion, without any verve behind it.

What is the point of it all if you can’t let loose, kick back and laugh about it all?

How do you include fun in your budget?

Spending your future now as opposed to later

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Photo attributed to flickr user jurvetson

I have been having a hard time motivating myself to write in this dingy weather, everything seems to stop when it’s cold and rainy outside. It just seems like the world stops and no one seems to care anymore. Of course, this is just in my mind, it is all in your mind. Being a desert baby, being born in the desert, and having lived in the desert till the age of 15, I wish to be hot all the time. No wonder I took to hot yoga so well. Ruminations aside, I started thinking about living in the present and living in the future.

A lot of spend a lot of time in our heads, thinking about the future, planning the future, dreaming the future, and whatever else it might be. Sometimes we go to the past, regretting the past, wanting to change the past, and all of those glorious emotions related to it, embarrassment, anger, regret, jealousy, and so on.

Even though we plan the future in our heads, a lot of us do not actually live in the present as if we are planning for the future. We spend all of our present income on the present, without ensuring that we save for the future. We spend all of our time in the present, as if we are never going to die, as if the future will never come. We live with all of our music inside of us, not letting it out yet, waiting for that ‘someday’ when all of our hopes and dreams will be realized. What are we waiting for and why are we living in the present robbing our future selves of everything important, time and money?

We are as the title says, spending frivolously now and having nothing later, instead of having ‘just enough’ right now and ‘just enough’ later. ‘Just enough’ is key. It doesn’t mean you scrounge. You have adequate food, adequate shelter, adequate transportation, and adequate clothing. You do not skimp on warm clothes in the winter, or walk around in shoes with holes in them. You take care of yourself, but you do not go overboard by spending $100 on a pair of flip-flops, or something else equally ridiculous.

‘Just enough’ ensures you have ‘just enough’ throughout your life, without having to scrounge, scrimp, save or regret.

Thanks for reading!

Loneliness in the world

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Photo attributed to Thenix

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my parents and how I am responsible in my head and theirs to fend off their loneliness. I was speaking to a friend of mine about this last weekend and I realized that it isn’t just me that is dealing with this issue. Every single one of my friends talks about how his/her parents are lonely, aren’t able to find solace in each other’s company or in their friends, are always looking to their children for help and support. I wondered about this. Why is the level of loneliness on the planet increasing exponentially? The more people that we have on this planet, it seems the more loneliness increases.

Technology definitely seems to contribute to the issue, but what else is making this happen? I really don’t understand. Is that the only reason people are having children so they can have that loneliness safety net? Or is it because people do not know how to be alone with themselves anymore? We are never alone, always surrounded by noise in some form, people, music, TV, and so on. We always looking for something outside of ourselves, when we are unable to find it in our jobs, our education, our money, our whatever, we go looking for it in our children. Who are too busy living their own lives, to be able to do much for us.

I do not have the answer in this post, nor do I really have the answers in general. But seeing all this sadness, this loneliness, really makes me sad. Why do people do this to themselves? We do not realize that we really have very few moments on this planet. Especially the older you get, the fewer the moments, the more the possibility of this moment, being your last one. We really have to savour it, learn to live on our own, and walk away from the loneliness. Choosing to be whatever we want in this moment is the key. You can make yourself feel whatever you want. Choosing contentment over loneliness is the way.

The Art of Finishing

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Photo attributed to Thenix

I have been guilty of this several times. I start something and never finish. I have great hopes when I begin, I want to finish what I start. I make plans in my head and sometimes on paper. I draw elaborate fish-bone diagrams to illustrate the project, I draw elaborate dreams in my head of how it will look when I finish.

Of course, 90% of plans never come to fruition. Maybe even more. I used to have a lot of regret about the plans that I never finished. I used to think to myself, if I had just stuck with one of those plans 10 years ago, I would be an expert in that field or I would have made it by now. It is that part of my thinking that I focused on and I realized, the problem isn’t that I am not finishing, the problem is that I am not even starting.

I have the idea in my head and I begin with the idea, and I polish up the idea, I work on the idea, I work and work and work on it. But at the end of the day, I do not actually begin any actual work on it. I have kept it an idea, and I haven’t moved it forward into the development stage. What I need to do, of course, is choose to begin. The idea seems daunting. You look at all the steps you have to take. All the millions of steps you have to take to get to the finish line, and you falter, you panic, you back-track. Maybe you do not have time or maybe you do not have the money or maybe you have another excuse on the plate.

I planned for years to take Spanish, I wanted to become fluent in the language. It was my dream. I never actually did anything about it. It seemed like too much to do. But this year, I decided enough is enough. I took the beginner course, and then the next one, and the next one, and now I am in the intermediate stage. I’m nowhere near fluent, but now that I’m closer to the finish line, I can smell victory and it feels good. I know I’m going to continue with it, because I have already spent a lot of time and energy on it. If I had done this years ago, I would be fluent by now.

What have you kept on the back-burner? What is one thing you would like to accomplish this year?

Receiving is hard for me

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Photo attributed to Thenix

I have written about receiving from the universe before here. I realized though that I really have to force myself to receive. I was sitting in a meditation class, in a cross-legged position, and I had my palms on my knees, as if to protect them from damage. The teacher said, ‘Have your palms facing up, if you wish to receive energy and facing down, if you wish to give.’

I tried to turn my palms upside down, face them outwards towards the world, but it was seriously a mental and physical effort to do that. My hands would not move. When I was in the position to receive with my palms up, I was uncomfortable. I felt uncomfortable. I looked uncomfortable to myself in the mirror. I wondered to myself, what the hell is going on? Why am I unable to receive energy? I have no trouble giving energy out, helping others, doing anything and everything for the people around me, but when it comes to receiving I have a real issue.

Why is that? I am a giver by nature, and I have been taught from the beginning of my life, by my parents that giving is good, taking is bad. Taking is selfish. My mother emulates that in her life everyday by giving everything she has, energy, time, money, even to people who do deserve it, even to people she dislikes, because it is good to give. My father does that everyday by giving all his energy, time and money to his businesses and his family, taking nothing for himself, because it is good to give.

They lament about the fact that they have a selfish daughter who doesn’t give, who doesn’t really take from them, but doesn’t really give back for all the years that she was dependent on them. I have learned slowly, but not completely, that giving is good, but there has to be a balance like everything else in life. You have to give as well as receive. You have to be comfortable doing both with equal intensities. You cannot be generous to the world and then refuse to take its presents and gifts to you. You cannot give away your energy to the world, and then refuse to take time to heal and rest yourself.

How are you with receiving and giving? What do you do more?