Choose to Live the Life You Most Envy

How would you like to live on a beach in Hawaii while you’re young enough to enjoy your children? What if your nicely tanned family could live on one parent’s full time income on a 40 hour a week job? What if this was absolutely true right now, in 2007? It is. It?s what a young couple, friends of mine, are doing today. They have made some very mindful choices. A recent poll reveals that 93% of Americans agree that we are too focused on working and making money and not enough on family? (New American Dream Survey. www.newdream.org). 93% is a big number. It?s almost as if we’re hypnotized by our current work and lifestyles whether or not it brings us satisfaction, let alone joy.

Are we allowing the financial-industrial complex, the Grid, to suck the life out of our souls? This morning I just read that 3 million Americans commute 90 minutes one-way to work. Three hours a day, 66 hours a month, 31 days a year. Millions of us are actually spending a month a year just to get back and forth to work. What are we doing? A brand new Harvard study labeled Americans the “unhappiest country on Earth” because we lead the world in clinical depression, stress related illness, and prescriptions to medicate us from our pain.

Well, the revolution is starting. Last week some Stanford law students started a campaign for graduating students to boycott law firms that don’t offer new associates balanced working conditions including a 50-hour workweek (Lattman, Peter. Wall Street Journal: Eastern edition, April 4, 2007, B2). While there are some of us who’ve become so addicted to never-ending work, cell phones, emails, texting, business travel, non-stop work related thinking and doing that we think it’s normal; it isn’t. Research is clear. Work without sustained breaks makes us stupid (HPinstitute.com). Ruins our judgment, clouds our ethics, and socially isolates us. (The guys at Enron loved to work.) The rat race is poison wrapped in success candy. And the race just gets faster.

It?s all a choice. If you doubt me, let me introduce you to Mark and Patria. Mark’s a 31-year-old father and Patria a 26-year-old mother of 2, Ruby and Atticus. Mark and Patria met and got married during college in Hawaii. Patria went on to get a Master’s degree in Social Work at Columbia University. After working in New York and northern California, they fulfilled their dream. They just moved back to Hawaii’s northeast shore. Patria is a social worker at a local hospital. Mark is a stay-at-home dad. Get this. They rented a home on the beach with a slide from their back yard to the sand surrounding a coral fringed lagoon.

They did all this without financial help from parents or permission from the Grid. They did it because they’ve been very clear on what they most valued, and they both agreed to “travel light.” They just choose to do what so many of us wish we could.

Well, you can. Our life is our choice. How’s your commute?

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