The Three Train Wrecks of Life

Photo by George Eastman House

A mentor I admire has described three train wrecks that can destroy our security. They are:

1. Finance

2. Health

3. Relationships

All three are important and interrelated. At different times in our lives, one will dominate over the others but all of us will have problems in each of the areas during our lives. Some of us do a good job in managing our lives so that crises (train wrecks) are infrequent and manageable. Others never learn how to manage their lives and rebound painfully from one train wreck to another.

If you have learned good techniques in each of these areas, by the time you reach retirement age, you have developed sufficient retirement investment to support your desired lifestyle, you will have relationships (marriage, friends, family) to give you the emotional support and companionship and you will have made the right lifestyle and health decisions to establish a good health baseline to support a healthy and vigorous old age.

Personally, my life has been full of train wrecks caused by poor decisions. I feel like I have been devoting most of my effort to managing those train wrecks. Only recently have I taken responsibility for my life and attempted to determine what is causing the problem and changing my life.

At the moment, it is my belief that my health is the strongest of the three areas. Nevertheless, it is still a matter of prime importance and I am committed to doing everything possible to maintain my current health and if at all possible improve it. I know that things can fall apart very easily and that my body has less strength and resilience now than when I was younger. As a result, I am actively researching the most effective ways to live a long and healthy life and organizing the information as a resource for others.

Actually, my biggest problem is in the financial area, not that I don’t have a adequate income. The problem is that I have to keep working to have the income. Working interferes with other life choices that I would like to indulge at my current advanced age and before it advances much further. As a result I have developed a new program to develop a sufficient residual income to replace my salary.

I will discuss the things that I am doing in this area in other posts. Meanwhile, maybe you are facing one or more of these train wrecks. Add a comment or send an email so we can share our experiences and life lessons. Life is too short to rely on only your own experience.