The Riches of Doing

Yesterday, Merlin Mann wrote a thought provoking blog piece: Re-Potting with Resources: What Would You Make? (43 Folders). He asks the question: If, tomorrow morning, you had 60% of the time and resources you needed to start making anything you wanted, what would it be? And, what would you do first?

Then this morning, my blog-buddy Nudge wrote a piece she called What is Wealth?

These two posts started resonating with each other, forming a chord that was greater than the sum of the two notes. The context, or key (as in the key of G) if you will, is what Mann calls “a blood-curdling recession.” Nudge speaks of the laid-off millions, wondering how they’re going to keep the lights on and their heads under a roof… and Mann asks them all you have plenty of time, and you have some resources… now what do you do with them?

My answer to Nudge’s question sounds flippant, but I was dead serious: screw the dictionary definition, wealth is whatever you say it is — because wealth means not only different things to different people, but different things to the same people at different times. For a long time, my personal definition of wealth was “not having to work for a living” — but that’s a binary definition of wealth. That definition says you either have it or you don’t, when in fact you can have some wealth, but not enough to give employment the finger and walk away. Before allowing myself to be saddled with FAR Manor, we had the old place paid off and no car payments, just a bunch of credit card debt that we were working off. I wanted nothing to do with a mortgage before getting rid of all other debts and building up a decent down payment, so we could make a house payment and still put some savings away. Way-ell… anything that wasn’t “yes dear” was summarily ignored until I wore down enough to say “to hell with it, if we get foreclosed we get foreclosed.”

These days, my personal concept of “wealth” is simply the time to do what I want to get done. Subtract sleep time, commute time, work time, meal time, cleanup time, then whatever little “surprises” wait for me when I’m home, and there’s very little left over for wealth. Sure, I have all the “stuff” I want and then some, but what I don’t have is the time to do much of anything with it. In this vein of thinking, getting laid off would make me wealthier, simply because I’d have more time to work on my own stuff (whatever the heck that is now). The way things are now, I have a hard time taking Mann’s advice to Imagine you have almost what you need. Then, just start something. — if I don’t have the time and materials to finish what I start, God only knows when I’ll be able to get the last remaining time or materials to finish the job. My garage and studio are littered with projects that died half-finished, simply because they got derailed for so long that I either forgot about them or lost track of where I left off and what I needed to finish. I was able to finish the cold frame because I had 100% of the tools & materials, and insisted on making time for it, before I really started. But it’s not really finished; I still need to paint it and I either need to scrounge or buy some paint (and, again, make time to apply brush to wood).

What I can do, though, is make plans for doing things if/when I get laid off. And there are things that I can nibble on a little at a time… for example, I’ve nearly completed FAR Future, a work that will end up at least the size of an average novel, in odd hours or fractions of hours over the last year & a half. Focus on the positive, look for things that you can do, and (most important) use your successes to kick-start the next project.