Control Freak

I met an old scouter at the grocery store this evening. We took a few minutes to chat about life and things. When I asked him how he was doing he responded that he was doing fine, and that life was just extremely busy. I get that a lot in my line of work. Especially from folks who at one time had been very involved volunteers and now were not. I don't take it ill when people move on. There are lots of ways to use your time and talents and the Boy Scouts is just one of them. People very appropriately come and wear themselves out on projects, and most of them will move on to something else by and by. Most people need a change of scenery in order to stay fresh.

I don't buy the "life's busier now than it once was" platitude though.

I think for some people life is busier now than it once was. And for others it is undoubtedly less busy. Last time I checked, there are still 24 hours in a day. Most people who are employed full-time work around eight of those, five days a week. I guess you could say that most of us would consider those eight hours "non-negotiable". By that I mean we realize that if we change what we do during those hours from on-the-job time to anything else, bad things will happen in fairly short order.

Many of us "feel" busier though. I believe this ardently. But I suspect that this feeling is self-imposed in many if not most cases. I drive around lots of neighborhoods and see lots and lots of satellite dishes and co-axial cables attached to lots of houses. That means folks are paying from $50 to $100 a month or more for their television programing. I believe most of them are getting their money's worth because I rarely enter a home when people are in it, including mine, wherein the TV is not blasting away. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says we're spending about the same amount of time at work as we have been since the middle of the 20th century. They also report that watching TV is the leisure activity that takes up the most of our time.

The TV most people watch doesn't result in any personal growth that would tend to give a person a feeling of satisfaction--it's just escape. And when we're wasting time (not that all time spent in "escape" is necessarily wasted) we feel anxious, and I think people interpret this anxiousness as feeling "busy". In other words, we instinctively know that we don't have time to both watch TV several hours most evenings and time to work, sleep, keep commitments and spend time in personal development. That's why so many of us are so "busy". People who don't watch TV can substitute idle internet use, trashy novels or whatever you piss your time away on and feel just as guilty.

I think it's sad that so many of us living in the USA during the 21st century aren't enjoying ourselves. We have more money, more labor-saving devices and techniques, and more choices than anyone else in history. Instead of using these blessings to enrich our lives, we go a little crazy and try to grab a double handful of too many things instead of taking a good look at our options and our available time and resources, and making reasoned choices as to how we are going to spend our time and money.

I said we had more time and money available to us and the ability to choose what to do with more of it than anyone else in history. That doesn't mean that we have an unlimited supply of either one. But we behave as though we did.

I believe that to be happy and to get rid of this feeling of being too busy, we need to learn to control three things.

Our time.

Our thoughts.

Our money.

Moreover, I believe that we need to learn that those three things are the only ones we can control. We have complete control over the decisions we make regarding those things. We often fail to make conscious decisions about any of the three. We spend our time trying to control our external circumstances, other people--some people think they can control the weather for crying out loud--and we wonder why we feel powerless.

Make intelligent decisions about how we spend our time, including the little 10-minute blocks of it we spend on things like looking for things we didn't put in their places, watching whatever was on TV when we looked over there, "zoning out", gossip etc. etc. and most of us would gain hours and hours every week to use on something meaningful to us. Some of us would gain hours each day.

Learn to screen thoughts and embrace only those that lead us towards positive attitudes, constructive self-images, and reasonable expectations for ourselves and others and we would loose that "lost" feeling. Feeling bad is not only unpleasant, it leads us to waste time just "bumming". We can control what we think about and how we do it. Most of us don't believe it or just haven't thought about it.

Every dime that flies out of our pockets did so because of a decision we made either at the moment it flew, or farther upstream when we incurred a debt or made some other financial commitment. The only possible exceptions I can think of is some illnesses and injuries and most taxes, which can be levied by politicians we neither agree with nor helped elect. Controlling our money is critically important because we get it through the expenditure of our time, energy, talent and (hopefully) passion. In other words, our money is nearly everything to us, and spending it is, or should be, the purest expression of what we value most.

You could devote an entire weblog on this one subject and keep it going for years while exploring the value of gaining control of the three things we can control, and of refraining to try and control the millions of things in life that we can't directly control at all.

What a good idea.