I woke up the other day, poured some coffee and sat on the front stoop of the cabana. I was staring blankly at the thick foliage of the green forest before I started my day of weed whacking, chopping and clearing away walking paths thru the thickness. It was then that it hit me in a way it hadn’t really before. We made it. We have achieved our goal of moving to a tropical island. All of the work, all of the planning and all of the saving has gotten us here. I felt it as an emotion this time instead of a logical thought.
Free as a bird in the jungle
Thinking about doing something can never actually replace the experience of actually doing it. It is now that we are here, that we can have the experience. A new plant requires the brain to look up in our vast memory and see if we have information about it. New smells, new sights and new people all require the brain to do some work. Since I have no information about much of anything here, it requires inspection and storage of the new info. The constant processing of new information reminds us of what it was like to be children again. With that comes learning, thinking and mistakes.
What is a truly awakening idea, is that everything that we do and think, we are in control of. If we want to paint a wall, it is because we have the belief that the wall needs to be painted. If we don’t like the way something is, it is because we have decided for whatever reason, that it shouldn’t be that way. There are very few actual truths and we have the freedom to decide what to think about almost everything.
Who has left the cage
Having grown up in a public school system that was and is designed to cultivate ‘productive members of society’, that think a certain way and behave in a particular manner and hold similar beliefs, it is a enormous realization that it is actually I that gets to decide most everything. Now actually doing this is very difficult as most of my beliefs were installed and then that’s just the way it is. Realizing that if I don’t like something it is simply because I have decided I don’t like it, is becoming a powerful tool. Can’t I just as easily decide to like it?
Tell me what I said I’d never do
Tell me what I said I’d never say
Read me off a list of the things
I used to not like, but now I think are okay
-Ben Folds Five Lyric
A tropical weed or simple beauty?
This head game became a challenge when thinking about weeds in my lawn back in Colorado. Dandelions were growing! Not taking the perspective that they are actually pretty flowers, which they are, but rather choosing to see them as invaders that were disrupting the uniformity of my green lawn. It became a problem that had to be dealt with! Even the radio ads were telling me that these weeds needed to be killed with chemical poisons that were available at my local hardware store. I don’t want to be “that guy” the ad told me “that has all the weeds in his lawn”.
Once I changed my thinking life went a little more smoothly. They aren’t weeds, they’re flowers. And as Cassie has pointed out to me, they are actually medicine and food too. I think this was the beginning of the realization of what actual freedom is. Apparently advertisers understand this, so they try to get you to believe that you have these ‘problems’ that their product can fix. It’s kind of a hijacking of ones thoughts. You can still choose to kill the dandelions or you can choose not to. But it is a CHOICE, not a given that they are bad things. They just exist. Whatever opinion of them is not the thing itself. It can be seen in many different ways, if you are open to that kind of freedom of thought.
I almost didn’t write about this subject because having total freedom of choice regarding what to think about, seems so obvious, yet in my day in and day out life I rarely if ever actually employed it.
A lot of people wouldn’t live how we are living. We live in a small space. Here on the island we have bugs, rats, and poverty. We have chosen no A/C or phone (except Google Voice now) or cable TV and yet somehow I am the happiest I’ve been in a long time. I think this is due to the fact that this is what I have chosen to do and I have the ability to see these things as benefits. This is the enormity of freedom.
No stove, no problem. Grilling outside any time of year!
Some might see rats and bees as bad things, but that means there is food/fruit everywhere. No A/C might be seen as too hot and uncomfortable, whereas I see it as one less thing to depend on for comfort that will one day break and require larger and larger bills to fuel. Poverty to me is much easier to fit my life around because that means the cost of living is lower, there aren’t as many expectations to drive nice cars, to have perfect landscaping or to obtain that status job. A small indoor living quarters means a lot of life goes on outdoors instead of in. Perspective.
It has been said that you can change the way you look at things, and the things you look at will change. I am finding this to be true and that is a big part of being free. And the things I look at every day here are just amazing!
