Enough said!
You have to earn jealousy
Believe in Ideas. Believe in Yourself.
Of course, it gets muddled when other religions teach the same thing that yours does. I find that it’s good to list what you believe and not what you are labeled as. For example, I believe in the Christ is okay, but saying that you believe in not stealing is better. I have homosexual friends who have this very dilemma. They believe in Christ and consider themselves to be Christians, but at the same time they are homosexual. They know that in their religious belief, homosexuality is considered sinful and wrong. Thus they have to reconcile the dissonance between what they believe to be true and themselves. I do not envy people in this situation.
This isn’t only a religious problem. I see this happen a lot in politics as well. People believe in a candidate, but don’t believe in all the ideas they have. Also, people will believe in a particular party and then the party changes an ideal they stand by and there is mass confusion. The republicans (and others) who were in office under George W. Bush, assisted him in racking up massive amounts of federal debt and plunging the country into a never ending war are very different from say, Eisenhower, who advocated for limited government and less debt.
Instead I find it better to follow ideas and believe in them than in people. Finding someone who will share all the same beliefs that you do is next to impossible, but finding someone who believes some of the same ideas that you do is a path toward mutual understanding and acceptance.
Believe in ideas. Believe in yourself.
Learning to take a vacation
I’ve always been a work-a-holic. As with many people I find it difficult to just sit and do nothing. If I go to the beach, I have to be swimming to some predetermined location. If I go to the mountains, I have to be hiking and taking pictures. If I go on a road trip, I have to be going somewhere. It’s difficult for me to simply enjoy the moment that I am in. I get bored and restless. So as a result, I spent most of my life working to reach some goal. When I was in high school, I earned money for college. When I was in college I worked for a degree. When I had a degree I got a job so I could support a family. I don’t have a family so in the end I find myself with nothing to work for. So I’m switching it to working for the weekend. I needed to learn how to take a vacation. I needed to learn how to enjoy life around me. I found that I had lived in Southern California all of my adult life and had never driven an hour to see Joshua Tree National Park… I had wasted years and then it was time to fix that.
The first step to learning how to take a vacation is to learn to leave work. I went into work and blocked out everything past 5:00. Then when people actually scheduled meeting past them the hard part came. I declined the meetings. It was stressful at first and my boss didn’t understand (he’s a work-a-holic too), but after several months I found that people didn’t care that I left work at 5. For crying out loud we laud the flex hours we have available!
The next step was to learn to take a day off. My bucket list came in handy for this. I took my calendar, and took my bucket list and decided I would do something on my bucket list one weekend out of the month. And that would take a Friday off. So I scheduled three Fridays off, put in the vacation requests, got them approved and then took the day off. It was difficult as I’m bored if I had nothing to do. But, the bucket list gave me something to do so I was still engaged in some activity and not bored.
As I finished up the bucket list of things around town, I needed to travel more. So I decided to go out of town. This required two days off and I found it much easier to do than before. I discovered that what I was actually doing is setting boundaries between my professional life and my personal life. I also found that come Monday morning (or the next day in the office), I had a much more exciting weekend than my colleagues. Most people like to sit at home. Using a bucket list and challenging your comfort zone allows you to experience more joy and fulfillment out of life.
Now some people have a profession that allows them to just go and take a week or two off. A friend of mine, who is a chef, had a break because her kitchen shutdown for winter. So she saved up some money beforehand and headed to Ireland and visited there for a few weeks. If you have that opportunity go for it… If it’s hard to set boundaries, try what I did and see if it works for you.
Some interesting places I’ve been since I started doing this are:
- Visiting the Valley of Fire
- Hiking the Grand Canyon
- Hiking Glacier Point, Lower Yosemite in Yosemite
- Visiting the Sequoia National Park
- Hiking Vernal Falls, Nevada Falls, Illouiouette Falls, Glacier Point, and Sentinel Dome in Yosemite
- Rock Climbing in Joshua Tree
- Visiting the Devils’ Golf Course, Artist’s Drive, The Lowest Point in the US in Death Valley
- Hiking Longs peak in Colorado
- Hiking Zion’s Emerald Falls, Angel’s Landing, and Temple of Sinawava.
- And Many More…