First You Plant Radishes

First, you plant radishes and pull weeds.

You start alone, with four planting beds, a broken down house and guest cottage, an empty chicken pen, and a whole lot of weeds, stumps, and rocks. Out back is a quarry and a woodlot.

Your goal is a renovated house and guest cottage, many more planting beds with orchards and vegetables in abundance, pens filled with chickens, geese, turkeys, black and white sheep, goats and cattle. In the end you hope to own a thriving business, with a truck stop, railway station, boat dock, sawmill, brick factory, canning factories, textile mills, dairies and bakeries. Your spouse and grandma and grandpa have arrived to help out.

But first, you plant radishes and pull weeds.

Start where you are, use what you have, and take one step at a time to a better future.

What holds true in the computer game Farm Up is surprisingly true in real life.

We can get overwhelmed with the mess. Income too low, expenses too high, the cupboard is filled with junk food that’s well past its expiration date, the basement and the living room and the office are filled with boxes of who-knows-what, and the mountain of dirty dishes wobbles and threatens to become an avalanche of pots and pans and broken plates with every footstep that passes.

So you eat out, and your waistline burgeons outward.

This is no hypothetical situation—it’s where I was just seven or eight short years ago.

I was hoping for a bit of magic.

A lottery win. A full time job. A fairy godmother.

Then I could afford to move into a bigger house, hire someone to sort through and organize my junk, pay off all my debts, and hire a personal trainer and a personal chef to help get my weight under control. Most importantly, I’d be able to hire someone to dust and vacuum and clean the cat litter and sort the garbage into the proper bins.

But I didn’t win the lottery, and my research has shown me that winning wouldn’t have done me any good. Most lottery winners end up right back where they were within seven years of winning. Many are worse off, because they’ve lost the support system that helped them when they were just barely getting by. Even people who earn lots of money don’t often keep hold of it—I’ve read that many professional football players declare bankruptcy within twelve years of retiring.

Winning the lottery doesn’t work for the same reason that crash diets and New Years’ resolutions don’t work.

The habits don’t change. The inner self doesn’t change. You can clean up the mess around the person, but unless the mess inside changes, the mess outside will reappear.

So you start where you are, and take it step-by-step, as I vowed to do seven years ago.

I started by taking out the garbage and doing the dishes. Little by little, my house became more peaceful. My financial situation improved. I started writing and painting and crafting again.

I have learned how to create lasting change in my life. Little by little, too, I have learned when to hire others or ask for help, and when I can go it alone.

I have a personal trainer, but I have become my own personal chef. My mom has moved in, and I have found ways for her to help out.

I don’t have the big business represented by the transportation hubs and the factories or even the vegetable gardens. Not yet. But they will come.

In the meantime, I have radishes to plant and weeds to pull.

Being Poor With Flair: The First Step

And the first thing you have to do as a poor person (or a rich one, for that matter) in order to truly enjoy and get the most out of life is...

Grow up!

Okay, so maybe that's a bit harsh, since I assume that most of you really are adults, both in age and in maturity. However, each of us has some areas of growing to do, and I learned (usually the hard way) that if you're poor, and if you want to enjoy life despite being poor, and even more so if you want to escape the maze of poverty, you need to really put some effort into the process of self improvement.

I've learned over the last couple of decades that despite the fact that many of my woes were caused by the actions or inactions of outside persons or forces, and despite the fact that there were and are lots and lots of people and organizations out there who want to help me, there is only one person in the entire universe who has the power to change my life for the better.

And that person is me.

I have to take responsibility for my own life and my own problems, no matter how or by whom they were caused.

I've known, and still know, a lot of poor people in my life. Those who are most unhappy with their situation and most stuck are those who spend their days blaming others for their predicaments. Instead of acting to make a better future for themselves, they react to negative situations without thinking, often going from one disaster to a worse one.

I'm disabled. My brother hacked my bank account and stole all my money. The company I worked for folded and there are no other jobs around here that pay enough to support me in the lifestyle I'm accustomed to living. I lost a bundle on the stock market when it crashed. My wife took the kids, the house, and half my paycheque...

You get the drift. There are countless ways the world knocks you down. You get hit by a car, and while you stumble around dazed, a freight train comes out of nowhere and flattens you. Life really isn't fair!

No, life isn't fair. It never has been, and never will be. So the first step in growing up and becoming an adult is accepting that fact, and learning to stop moaning about it.

Step two is realizing, deep down in your gut, that no one, absolutlely no one else on earth (except for God, if you believe in God), cares more about your future than you do. If you won't do at least some of the work to help yourself, no one, not even God, can help you.

There's a joke about this: A woman (we'll call her Ruth) prayed to God daily that she would win the lottery. "God," she prayed, "I really need this money to pay of my student loans and my kids' student loans and my husband's credit cards and to help my daughter go to graduate school and to set up a trust fund for my disabled son."

Day after day, Ruth prayed earnestly to God.

Finally, she heard the voice of God replying to her earnest prayers.

"Ruth," God said. "Meet me halfway on this, will you? Go out and buy a ticket!"

Resolving to take responsibility for your life and to act on your own behalf after thinking through the alternatives is like buying a lottery ticket, with one very big difference.

The difference is that instead of having almost zero chance of winning, your chance of winning is 100%.

So go look in the mirror, and say to yourself, "Self, it doesn't matter whose fault it was that I'm where I am now. It doesn't matter how or why my life got broken. The only thing that matters is who's going to change things, who's going to fix things. And that who is me. Starting right this minute."

I'm Going Back to School!

Sort of.

I was Stumbling around the net the other day, and came across this post. I read it. Then thought about it. And realized that while I couldn't afford to do everything on the list, I could certainly afford to to anything with a $0 price tag attached, and that it would be a pretty good substitute for playing Sims. Well, some of the time, anyhow.

Now I already have two master's degrees. I don't really need any more. But that doesn't mean my education's over by a long shot. There's a lot I haven't seen, heard, done, or read. A lot of things that I'd like to do before I finally kick the bucket.

You'll find online or in bookstores literally hundreds of books that tell you what you should do or see or learn before you die (or reach the age of thirty, whichever comes first.) If you took them at their word, you'd be spending every single minute of your time watching movies or travelling to far-flung places or reading books, and you'd starve to death before two months passed, because you wouldn't have time to eat.

This list is a little different. For one thing, there's a specific time period involved. One year (though in my case, it'll take longer due to the financial aspects.)

There's a limit to what needs to be done or learned. 20 fiction books, 30 non-fiction books, 3 new skills, 1 language.

And the skills and the books and the language aren't dictated by the author of the post. You can choose what suits you best, which means that everyone's "freeform master's degree" is going to be different.

In my case, I can forsee the non-fiction reading being along the lines of religion and society, religion and science, and a few economic and business texts thrown in. The fiction I've already decided will be classics I haven't read before.

I'm hoping that I can somehow upgrade this jackboot master's programme into a doctorate, which means I'd have to have a theme of sorts, and a topic for a thesis that would develop into a book. Most likely is something to do with the place of religion in society. I wouldn't get the piece of paper, but that isn't the point. The point is, in my case, to produce some original writing on the topic that may somehow be worthy of publication, and might make some contribution to the debate on the place of religion in modern society.

Looking down the list, there are a couple of things that I've already got well covered. Basic presentation and public speaking skills, for one. Been doing presentations of many sorts, and doing them well, for decades now. I don't think toastmasters is going to be able to teach me what I don't already know. Writing well is another skill that I've already acquired. Though I may well read the suggested text, Bird by Bird, as it's available in my public library.

On to what I can start to do, right here, right now.

Blogging is the most obvious choice. I have three blogs right now. One, "Death by Trumpet", I haven't used in years. It was devoted to a particular novel I wrote for November National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) in 2009. I didn't finish posting the book, and I haven't used the blog since.

There's "Confessions of a Slob" which details my somewhat haphazard approach to cleaning and re-organizing my house.

Then there is this blog, which was originally intended to collect my pearls of wisdom on self-improvement, actually became an outlet for publishing some of my sermons (I did tell you I had some public speaking experience, didn't I?), and is now being re-purposed to become the vehicle for this experiment in self-education.

It actually won't change all that much except for one thing: I hereby commit to posting at least twice per week--once on Wednesday, and once on Saturday. And the scope will be somewhat widened--I may publish sermons, or musings on what I've read, or my answers to strange and wonderful philosophical quesions from this blog, or...

So the blog will still be, I hope about building an awesome life. It just won't all be sermons. (Don't y'all deafen me with your cheers, now!)