Journey to Future Freedom

Tag: future

  • 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.

  • “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

    ― Søren Kierkegaard

    I have no idea who the person who said this is or was. Feel free to educate me. But wow lately I have realised there is nothing truer than this statement.

    I have found myself embracing what I can learn from my past. There have been many years where I felt bitter, disappointed, upset by things that had happened. Wondering why they happened. Annoyed at myself for decisions that I had made.

    I would wake up at an hour where people should only be asleep and go over these things in my head. Over and over, the thoughts would overwhelm me until I finally feel asleep again…most probably a few minutes before the alarm went off.

    Through this journey I have found myself letting go of the past. I still have a long way to go but I have been looking at it through a different lens. It is so easy to get wrapped up in our own version of what happened, another persons role. But we rarely stop to consider a different version of the past. I look at my childhood and lately have attempted to view it from the perspective of my parents, or my sister.

    I had a conversation recently with my younger sister about the day she found out she was pregnant with her first, she was 23 if I remember correctly.

    I remember the day clearly. She told me she thought she was pregnant and asked me what I thought she should do. I said buy a test and find out so off we went to the local shopping mall. She took the test in the toilets, found out she was pregnant and we then went at sat in our local coffee shop for an hour figuring out how to tell Mum without her hitting the roof.

    I thought that I had done a good job of being excited for her, as we had been trying for a couple of years and had had two miscarriages. I was excited for her and for our family. Long story short, she told Mum and yes she hit the roof. To her credit she came down within a few hours and proved herself to be a wonderful grandmother with patience we certainly didn’t see when we were young.

    My sisters perspective on the day is very different. She was terrified of not being pregnant but of my reaction, as I was the one married and trying for children. She thought I would be upset and disappointed, she was correct I obviously had those emotions but it was not with her just the situation. Our lens were different as they should have been.

    There is so much to be understood and learned from the past but it certainly isn’t worth dwelling on or regretting. Take the learning that you can and move forward with life.