Day 6 #Trust 30 - Come Alive by Jonathan Mead

Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive.

Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral?

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I am sitting here entering Girl Scout registrations into the database. I'd have to admit that this is NOT something I would add to my To Do list if I had one week left to live. But that seems too contrite. I have one week before I leave Shanghai for the summer. Admittedly this is not the same as one week to live, but I do have a limited amount of time before I go. I have to be selective about what is going to get done before I go. 

If I think about how I chose my goals right now, I see that when I eliminated most of the "career" goals from my list, I filled it with this things that I thought or hoped might make me come alive. Many of those things have not done that. I should probably not be so hard myself. Trying something new may or may not be required to "bring me alive" to still be satisfying. However, I do see that a good cleaning of my goals this summer will be very valuable to me.

So, here is what I moving to my STOP list today: 

• Watching television - sorry Spartacus: Blood and Sand has to go...
• Reading mediocre novels
• Eating Papa John's Pizza 
• Buying any more crap at the Fake Market
• Reading more than 15 minutes of news video about Chinese doing crazy things like crashing cars on purpose and holding children at knife point to get out of traffic tickets (must be the dry weather as is seems China has more than their share of CRAZY going on right now)
• Moving my piles of junk from one room to the other - I am tossing this stuff into a box and assuming if I need something EVER I will sort through it then.
• Making my bed - wait I already did that a year ago, I just want to validate the reason was that it didn't give me life
• Arguing with Natalie about what she is wearing

Good list. In terms of the bonus, I actually feel that MOST of my goals are about the present and not enough are focus on long term happiness. So I have to think about that for a while.