Downturn makes a good excuse to scale back
The drop in the Dow, the busted banks, the losses ricocheting through your retirement plan. It's all an invitation to recalibrate, to ratchet things down, to learn how to find happiness in simple small things again.
It's a matter of changing the scale of things, of living proportionately, with some sense of introspection.
Hey, come on. What's money good for anyhow? All it does is buy stuff. And when you buy stuff, you figure out pretty quickly that you don't really own it. It owns you.
I know a guy with four all terrain vehicles. He needed them. Bad. Then he needed a trailer to haul them. And a truck to tow the trailer. Now he and his family need to go somewhere and use the ATVs every weekend.
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It's the same for people who own boats. They get home from the lake around eleven Sunday night, all sandy and sunburned. They back the boat into the driveway, unhitch, walk into the house, and collapse.
And a lake home isn't really a lake home. It's an exercise in bipolarity. When you're at home, you worry about the lake place. When you're at the lake, you worry about home.
Trust me on this: If somebody tells you they own something, "free and unencumbered," don't believe them. It wasn't free, and they're encumbered. They just haven't figured out how yet.
The airways are loaded with commercials that want you to want more -- and to be unhappy if you can't have it. Meanwhile, life's simple small stuff goes unnoticed and unappreciated. And there's so much of it. It's everywhere within the quintessential normalcy of our Minnesota lives.
Family dinner. Homework at the kitchen table. Putting the snow shovel away for the season. Having a kid around who'll pull your finger when you ask him to. Birdfeeders. Spring bulbs coming up. A good library nearby. A good book from that library on the bedside table.
The list is literally endless. And free. There's no 800 number to call. The only operator standing by is you.
So you don't forget, act before midnight tonight. Scale back. Uncomplicate. Engage your quintessential inner Minnesotan.
C'mon. Put something big and heavy aside. Appreciate something small and simple today.
