Life Lessons for Loving the Way You Live

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Life Lessons for Loving the Way You Live7 Essential Ingredients for Finding Balance and SerenityB Y J E N N I F E R R E A D H A W T H O R N E,J A C K C A N F I E L D a n d M A R K V I C T O R H A N S E N

Life Lesson #5: Try Something Different

Determine that the thing can and shall be done, And then we will find the way. - Abraham Lincoln

HUMANS TEND TO BE creatures of habit. We like our routines, and often our lives run in well-worn grooves. Of course, there is nothing wrong with indulging in the familiar; it provides a sense of order and security in our lives. But a life of routine can also become predictable and boring. It can cut us off from the wellspring of life and make us unable to respond freshly, in the moment, when new ideas and situations present themselves.

Once in a while it's a good idea to try something different, to go beyond our normal boundaries and comfort zones and take just a little bit of a risk. Someone we know, who had never learned to swim as a child and was afraid of water, decided to try something different when, in his mid-forties, he plucked up the courage to take swimming lessons. Overcoming his body's resistance to leaving the familiarity of the earth beneath his feet, he discovered the sheer joy of moving through water.

Sometimes we close off new possibilities or pleasures for ourselves by clinging to old, unexamined beliefs. An amusing example of this was a TV ad a few years ago for a well-known beverage. A man drinks a glass of the advertised product, with great enjoyment, but without knowing what he's drinking. When someone informs him, he says with astonishment, "But I hate _____ !" In other words, he had a preconceived idea about what he liked and didn't like, but when he inadvertently tried something different, he found out what he had been missing. On some occasions we might hear a little voice inside saying, I'm not even going to consider doing that because it just isn't the kind of thing I do! Try gently asking that voice, Why not? Often, it's just the habit or the fear of not being in control that keeps us from trying something new, or something old in a new way.

Trying something different can help us when we're stuck. As the saying goes, if you keep doing the same thing, you will continue to get the same result. Do you want the same result today that you had yesterday? Sometimes. But sometimes not. Life is always here, right now, with its myriad possibilities in every moment. If we can just once make that decision, I'm going to try something different, we will open up pathways within us in which creativity can flourish, unexpected connections can be made, and new possibilities explored. It certainly worked for , whose story follows.

Our House, Our Teacher

I read the letter to my wife, Susie, after recovering from my shock. The management was raising our rent by ninety dollars. Our finely tuned budget had just hit a landmine.

Over the next few days a crazy idea kept coming to me. I tried to dismiss it, but it kept coming back: Build a house. It was crazy because we had no savings and were both working full-time trying to make ends meet. Gradually though, a strange kind of logic began to assert itself. If we spent the next five years trying to build a house with no resources, we would probably fail - but we might succeed. On the other hand, if we didn't try, we would definitely end up with nothing.

We decided to embark on a grand experiment. We would simply proceed as if the enormous obstacles didn't exist. Believe me when I tell you this was not characteristic of us. I, at least, was one who always saw the obstacles to any proposal, all the ways it could end in disaster. But our feeling of helplessness at the rent increase had driven us into a corner, and we felt compelled to try something different.

I had heard about the value of visualizing what you want for your life. So I started by drawing plans for a large Swiss chalet, and that fall, we spent our weekends looking at land. One Sunday, we stopped at Susie's parents' after looking at a lot nearby. We decided not to tell them our scheme because they were practical Mainers - they'd think we were insane. But as we were leaving, Susie's mom noticed the blueprints on the dashboard of our car. We sheepishly told them what we were doing, and we drove off feeling silly.

A few days later they invited us to dinner. "Bring your house plans," Susie's mother said. After dinner they grilled us about our plans, and we anticipated a lecture about practicality. Instead, they said they were giving us enough money to buy land and pay for the groundwork. We were flabbergasted. Did they know something we didn't? They were offering to start us on a project we had no means of finishing. Still, we figured land is never a bad investment, so we took them up on it. We found a few acres near the Kennebec River that winter.

By the Fourth of July, we had a driveway, a foundation, and a septic system. We had stretched the money enough that we could buy lumber and begin framing on our weekends. Susie and I worked hard, but with a seven-year-old daughter who had to be kept out of harm's way, it was slow going. By late August, though, we had a plywood platform.

Then disaster struck. I was laid off from my job as a typewriter repairman. Finances became tighter still, but it also meant I had much more time to work on the house. Since the job market was depressed, I went full-steam ahead that fall.

By mid-January the money from Susie's parents was gone. We had framed up a good-sized house. Maine went into a deep freeze, and there it stood, our frozen half-baked dream. We couldn't take out a construction loan, because I had no job, and Susie's was only seasonal. Had we built a huge monument to our folly?

In our snug apartment I sat down to confront the neglected paperwork. I had at least separated the bills from the junk mail and credit card offers. Then a second crazy idea occurred to me. We could accept the credit cards, finish the house enough to move in, and then use the money that was now going to rent to pay the cards off. If anything went wrong, we could end up in bankruptcy, but it seemed the solution was there on my desk, staring me in the face.

For the first time in our cautious lives, we decided to take a leap of faith. Susie and I resolved that we were going to live in that house. We accepted several new credit cards, the weather broke, and we resumed work.

That's when the miracles started to happen. We disliked wallboard and wanted expensive knotty-pine interior walls. I drove to the lumber company, and there was a truckload of knotty-pine boards sitting in the parking lot with a sign that said $108, a tiny fraction of its value. I told them to deliver it.

For the ceilings I didn't mind wallboard so much, but I realized I couldn't put the heavy sheets up by myself. This time there was a truckload of pine shiplap boards in the lumber company parking lot for the same ridiculous price. We wanted high-quality lighting and settled on some schoolhouse style fixtures that were expensive. We needed five but held off on buying them because our credit line was dwindling fast. By then, my unemployment had run out, and I had taken a part-time job in a furniture store. One day my boss came in with a box of five schoolhouse light fixtures that he had bought years before. I hadn't told him I was looking for light fixtures, let alone this particular style. He just thought I could use them.

We wanted wood panel doors, not the less expensive hollow type. The father of one of our daughter's playmates offered us serviceable panel doors that he had salvaged from a junkyard.

That spring we needed at least eight loads of topsoil to cover the septic system. I noticed that some men were deepening the ditches on our road, and I asked them if they wanted a place to dump the rich silt they were digging out. They dumped twenty loads on our property, enough to do the whole yard.

And so it went. On the Fourth of July, one year after we had started the framing, we moved in and started putting our rent toward our credit card payments. The house was in rough shape: no flooring, no siding, few windows. But it was livable - and it was ours.

It took another two years of part-time work to finish it. By the time it was finished, I had decided to attend graduate school in the Midwest. Building the house had expanded my vision enough that I could actually contemplate doing something more fulfilling with my life. Just days after pounding in the last nail, we sold our dream house and moved out. The money paid off the credit cards and bought us a house near my new university.

People ask if we've ever regretted giving up the dream house we worked on so hard. The answer is no - the house was our teacher. It taught us that we can do what we want with our lives despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles. To this day, we keep a picture of the house on our dresser. It is a constant reminder of what we can do when we set our minds to it.

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Pause and Reflect

Are you stuck in old familiar routines? What holds you back from taking a leap into the unknown? When was the last time you decided to do something differently? What was the outcome? Examine your resistance to doing things differently from time to time.

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Aseem Kaistha

It's your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude.