Tag: books

  • The Many Onion layers of life

    When I started this journey I thought that progress would be linear. It is not!

    I haven’t posted about a book in a while. I was struggling my way through ‘The Millionaire next door’ and after a month of that I decided to leave it for now. The book itself is good and full of useful information but I feel as though the information is from about twenty years ago. I haven’t looked at the publishing date though so it very well could be.

    I also feel as though I have got the budget into a pretty good place where we are doing a reasonable amount of saving for both retirement and the future, especially considering we are at the most expensive time in our lives. Children in private school and doing expensive sports, at least I hope this is as expensive as it gets.

    So I decided to lean into a different area and am now reading, ‘Fast like a girl’.

    So back to the layers of the onion and progress being all zig zagged and definitely not linear. I am beginning to see that there are pillars to my journey, layers as such that kind of all intertwine together to make up me and the new version of myself that I am looking for.

    There is a financial pillar that is helping us towards future financial freedom. A physical pillar that is helping me find a better and healthier version of myself and mental or spiritual pillar. There may be more that I find as the journey progresses.

    Last week was crazy I travelled half the country for sporting events and worked almost full time. I stayed in a house with 12 other people. This is something that 6 months ago would have sent me spiralling into a place I really didn’t want to be. Don’t get me wrong I did have my moments where I really doubted whether I could do what I said I would do. However, I actually had fun. I handled it well and I enjoyed the company of 10 teenage girls. I got to know some of my daughters friends better and I got to see them work as a team to achieve great things.

    This week is much calmer and everyone is where they need to be and so I decided to focus on my physical health. I have mentioned before that I am about 15kg overweight and want to do something about it. I have dabbled in fasting before and enjoyed it so we will see where this journey takes me.

    I guess one of the things that is really impacting me is the fact that I am focusing on this being a journey… there is no destination, achieve or fail, I don’t even know if there is an end goal or what that will look like. I am just going with it.

    At times it feels a bit all over the place but mostly it feel empowering. As long as I am making progress towards bettering myself and my life i’m okay with it. Some things work and some don’t. I am discovering layers to my thoughts and feelings that I probably plastered over years ago hoping to never delve into again but that is okay too. I feel because I have no finite goal on the journey there is no ability to fail just to make progress…whatever that looks like.

  • Better Off!

    Wow what a read this was. It really challenged my thoughts around what I would be prepared to live and live without. I often think that Technology is both a curse and a blessing at various different times and so it was an enjoyable read. You could really feel the growth that happened as the couple worked their way through the 18 months that they lived without.

    The conveniences that we live with; running water, instant heat, light at the flick of the switch, refrigeration. The ability to boil the jug, use the oven within minutes of turning it on, dry my clothes in the drier on a rainy day, search google for a recipe or information. Pop to the supermarket when short on an ingredient.

    I am sure that I could live without some of them. I would just need to be more organised or perhaps have a lot more time on my hands. Which I guess is where the convenience of it all comes in.

    I think it would be fun to rent an off grid home for a weekend and take the family away to see how we all cope with it. Probably be a great way of torturing the teens and probably ourselves in the process.

    Is it something you could do?