Outrageous Travel Lesson 8

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Don’t blame your partner for anything.

Any problems are your responsibility to fix.

There is an important life lesson that I learned late in life.  It says that you can’t fix anything unless you take responsibility for it.  Most people blame something or somebody every time life goes wrong.  It feels so good to tell yourself that it isn’t your fault and that you can’t to fix it.  So many people approach life that way that it seems normal.  You aren’t to blame is such a comforting thought when you find yourself in a bad situation.  But taking the easy path is seldom the road to happiness.

BV5 020 300x225 Outrageous Travel Lesson 8The problem with this thinking is that if a bad situation is someone else’s fault, then you are helpless to change it.  You are a passive, powerless leaf in a windstorm and your life is a crapshoot.  It is far better to take responsibility for everything that happens because if you are responsible then you have the ability to change what is happening.  When you look at life with this perspective, luck is irrelevant and blame or excuses are meaningless because you are the master of your life and there is always something you can do to make it better.

Whenever you have a partner there are complications and compromises.  Successful relationships work these out and distribute responsibilities.  From time to time, however, one partner might find that decisions or actions by the other partner cause  undesirable outcomes.  When this happens, it is natural to blame, criticize and argue and it is hard to move on afterwards.  A small disappointment can grow into something serious. A minor situation can grow into a major conflict.

One example from our recent trip was a decision to visit downtown Buenos Aires at sundown and have  dinner before returning home.  We strolled around, selected a restaurant that looked pleasant and settled in for a nice meal.  The restaurant featured Italian food but my wife wanted a steak.  No problem because how could you go wrong ordering steak in Buenos Aries?  To our surprise, the steak was overcooked, my wife was unhappy and the evening was ruined. We sent the steak back and left.    My mind was reeling.  It had been a great evening up to the point the overcooked steak arrived.

In my mind it was all my wife’s fault.  I knew who to blame.  She should have known better than to order a steak in an Italian restaurant.  How stupid!  If she had wanted a steak then why didn’t she tell me to find a Parrilla (Argentine Steak House)?  In Buenos Aires, they are as common as Starbucks here.  We had passed several.  What possessed her to order a steak in an Italian restaurant?  Why did she have to ruin the evening?  You can understand where this thinking  leads and it isn’t pretty.  I wanted no responsibility for this unfortunate experience.  I wanted to blame my wife.  After all she had ordered the steak.  But I stopped myself.

I bit my tongue, gritted my teeth and escorted my wife out of the restaurant and into a cab.  It wasn’t my wife’s fault that the restaurant couldn’t cook a steak.  There was no reason to blame her for ruining an evening just because she wanted a steak in an Italian restaurant.  After three weeks in Buenos Aires we didn’t think it was possible for an Argentine to treat a steak badly.  The truth was that up until the steak arrived at our table, it had been a great day.  Why let an overcooked steak turn it bad?

In the cab ride home we moved on and talked about what to do tomorrow.  What might have been an evening of blame and conflict tuned to the good.  Some wine and cheese on the balcony made the steak a distant memory.

I decided that if there was blame for getting a bad dinner experience, it was mine.  I might have tried harder to learn what my wife wanted- or didn’t want- for dinner.  I might have suggested that maybe an Italian restaurant was not the place to order a steak.  Most important, I decided that a bad steak was not going to ruin my evening, my day or my life.  I took responsibility and resisted the urge to blame my wife for something beyond her control.

By taking responsibility on my shoulders, a bad steak was just a minor event not the ruin of an entire day.   There is even a silver lining.  It’s a great story now that we are back home.  How many people ever get a bad steak in Buenos Aires?

Thinking about work.

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300px Modern chain gang Thinking about work.

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Retirement puts work in a new perspective. When I was working, the idea was that work was part of a career. You chose a profession or a calling and it defined your life and who you were. That was always the way I thought about it when I was young and getting started with my life. It pretty much stayed that way through my career although toward the end I found myself wondering about my choices. Was there a better way to manage my life and could I manage without a job altogether. And who was I anyway?

Still I maintain a pretty conventional outlook toward work. I couldn’t get over the feeling that my job defined me. Even when I was stimulated to consider the fantasy jobs I wished for in my life, I couldn’t get past the idea of a job and working for someone. Most people don’t have an independent income and need some way to support themselves. These days, the standard is a job, selling your time and talent for money. We like to rationalize that into a career or a calling but there is nothing noble about exchanging time for money and being dependent. A job is selling out a part of your life.

There is nothing wrong with this transaction but when we turn it into something noble and call it a career, your life gets perverted. Your priorities are all off.

Who are you really?

I was shaken out of that mindset by a comment on my post about career fantasies. Hansi said “Wait a minute. I didn’t have any stinking career. I’m not defined by what I did for 30 years. It was just something I agreed to do to support the lifestyle I wanted.” I’m paraphrasing and expanding his comment a bit but I think I’m pretty close. No bullshit about how much satisfaction and community value resulted from his work. Obviously value was provided but it didn’t define who Hansi was. He didn’t need the job to give his life meaning. When did I miss that lesson?

As a recovering career seeker, I wish I might have had a better perspective about work during my ‘career’. It might have saved me a lot of frustration and heartache. It might have given me freedom to be me. It might have changed my life and put me in a better place to manage my life.

As it is, my eyes are opening now as I try to design and manage a retirement lifestyle without the support from a job or career to define me. I am winging it but slowly I seem to be growing a backbone and taking chances both in ways to make money and ways to live. I still need work but no more selling out and no more career. I’m designing a lifestyle.

Thinking about work.

Originally posted 2011-10-18 05:40:48. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Lists from the past

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3596829214 93ddeb6cbf m Lists from the past
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Lists are good.

Lists have been hot here at RCB over the past week Both the top 10 reasons to post daily and the top 10 reasons not to post daily roused some lively comments and an interesting exchange about the right policy. Those comments provide the life blood for a blogger, feedback. Information about what the readers found in a post, what they liked and often a fresh perspective.

Lists can get better.

For long months as I began blogging, those comments weren’t coming. I had readers but they were not leaving any information about what they thought. Problogger told me that readers like lists and that they are more likely to respond when you ask a question. So I began posting lists.  Today I would like to ask a favor from my readers. Take a look at these two list posts from last year. Give me some feedback and any ideas you have to improve them. What did I leave out? What should I leave out? Which do you think is the most important item on each list and why. Leave your comments here or on the posts. It’s all good. Thanks

Number 1 is my speculation about why readers don’t leave comments.


Number 2 is my list of ways to make your marriage better.


Lists from the past

Originally posted 2010-02-03 09:15:23. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

How can you keep your life balance on the great adventure?

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falls51 768x10244 How can you keep your life balance on the great adventure?


 

Life Balance ?  What’s that.

Last week I asked for companions on the great adventure of creating a full and rich lifestyle while getting older. My vision is for building a business while maintaining my health and enjoying the world around me. Your vision might be different. You might call this life balance. You might see this as another way to visualize your perfect day. Maybe you think of it as a way to avoid one of the three train wrecks of life that looms in front of you. It might be finance. It might be health. It might be relationships.

Losing my balance

Lately my attention has focused on working my business plans. Somehow I wasn’t making time for exercise and fun. It was very clear that I was out of balance. I was also in denial. I told myself that it would be alright as soon as the business takes hold. It is so easy to lie to yourself about the consequences of your actions. I was saying that I would do those things when money rolls in. The lie is in believing that you can always do something that you defer today. It is a lie when you are young but it is a major deception as you reach senior status. You have less time but that is not the most serious problem. If you don’t use your body, it loses strength and capability. Many of the limitation of aging are less with the deterioration of your body over time and more with loss of capability from lack of use. Use it or lose it is never truer than as you age.

Taking Charge

This week I implemented a change. I have long said that I wanted to do some hiking. I have lived for five years in the Sierra foothills and experienced very little of the beauty all around me. Not this week. Friday I took a short hike to Bassi Falls. It is an easy two mile hike to a spectacular waterfall in the Crystal Basin Recreation Area. The hike was fine but getting there and getting home was an adventure. More about the adventure later. Right now, we are talking life balance and the benefits of exercise and stimulation to complement hard work and mental focus on an essential task. It was delightful to be at 6,000 feet surrounded by majestic pines and breathing clean air. Hiking a trail, even an easy one makes you move in different ways from normal walking. Muscles are working that are normally unused . Senses are fully stimulated with new sights. Your mind becomes concerned about making the right decision about where to step. Even an easy hike on a well marked trail takes you to new levels of consciousness and experience. Every power you posses is in use as you look at the beauty, keep your balance and plan your course over the twists and turns, smooth and rough terrain of the trail. This hike let my mind work on different problems and engage the new and beautiful surroundings. I came back invigorated and refreshed, a better and healthier man.

Refining my plans

My original idea was to devote one day each week to a hike. This may prove too ambitious or perhaps I can find trails closer to home that will make it easier to get me going. Maybe one day a week is too much. I have to work out the details. What I know is that it felt great to start getting my life balance adjusted. Have you looked at your life balance and decided that it needed changing? What have you done or what do you plant to do? If you are taking my glorious adventure challenge, share your actions and join the team. If you want to see the beauty of Bassi Falls then check out my pictures.

Originally posted 2010-06-21 08:13:12. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Outrageour Travel Lesson 7

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Take chances!

You aren’t reading this post because you are looking for the fanciest cruise line or the best tour company.  You want your travel to be special and unique.  You don’t want average.  You don’t want to go with the herd and so you didn’t choose the 10 day all expenses paid tour with a new city every night.  You decided to spend enough time in one place to learn its rhythms and idiosyncrasies.  But don’t stop there.  Get off the beaten path.  Go where the tourists aren’t.

LostVenice2 Outrageour Travel Lesson 7

Get lost!

Outrageous travel is an attitude adjustment.  It changes you from passive observer to active adventurer.  When is the last time you took a chance?  Picked the road less traveled?  Chose the action where the outcome was unknown?  If you can’t remember, then you haven’t been living life to the fullest.  One of the reasons for spending one month in a place is to get yourself out of a rut.

Many decisions in life are driven by a scarcity mentality; People avoid making risky decisions because they can’t afford to take a loss.  If you travel on a tight schedule, you can’t afford to waste time and so you pick the sure things- the guided tours, the ‘best’ attractions,  the ‘top rated’ events.  You follow the herd.   As a result you get ‘programmed’ into the crowd of ordinary tourists doing ordinary things and see more of the back of the tourist ahead of you in line than the place you are visiting.  You see the same things that everybody else sees.  Your pictures look like everybody else’s pictures.  Your memories of your ‘once in a lifetime’ trip consist of standing in line.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

A month long outrageous travel experience gives you other options.  Certainly you want to see the famous attractions which will inevitably mean crowds and lines.  But there is more you can do.  You can take chances.  You can check out some of the not-so-obvious attractions, go where the crowds aren’t and where the natives are.  You can experience what regular life is like in Rome or Buenos Aires.  When you approach travel as a lifestyle choice instead of a schedule of events, each moment is an adventure.  You don’t know the results.  You can’t predict what the day will bring.

It is a sad thing that this lesson is necessary but getting older makes it harder to embrace uncertainty.  Life, the accumulation of relationships, assets and experience encourages caution.  Young people have little to lose and time to recover.  As people age, each year adds something more to protect and reduces the recovery time for loss.  It is natural for people to increasingly avoid risk until it becomes a principle.  But much is lost as well. Taking the safe path lowers risk but limits adventure, personal growth and joi d’vivre.  This could be the beginning of a treatise on life but we will focus on travel for now.  On your travel, playing safe minimizes risks but until you look at the balance between risk and reward, you won’t know that playing safe is the best course.

There is a lesson for life from finance.  Financial analysts don’t avoid or embrace risk.  they manage it.  Portfolio analysis manages risk by combining high and low risk investments to maintain a comfortable overall risk level while maximizing income.  This is important because low risk investments almost always provide lower income.  The highest income results from using high risk instruments.  A financial analyst’s job is to select the proper portfolio of low and high risk investments to provide the highest income.  It is the same with life.

So on your outrageous travel month in Rome or wherever you decide to go, manage that risk.  Take some chances on your schedule.  Look for the minor attractions because they are often better and more accessible than the tourist must see list.  Do what the locals do.  Ride the bus or subway.  Check out the markets.  Get lost.  Sit in a sidewalk café and let the world go past.  Don’t worry about wasting your time because an adventure is never wasted time.  At worst, your experience will make a great story once you get back home.