Planned life
It's been a real full on week! I think I've seen more people more times in the last week than in the rest of the month (and possibly the month before that as well). I would have expected myself to be sick of people by now, but it's actually been quite enjoyable and just good to get my social antennae back into gear again. I have to admit, I was a bit short on Christmas/holiday spirit going into the period. The magic of the season just wasn't there for me. Maybe because recently I've just been so into trading and getting on top of my new line of work that I've neglected the other parts of my life. It was good then to step away from it for a while and just hang out with everyone, which is something that I really enjoy. Kudos to everyone for restoring the magic of the holidays.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about living in the present versus thinking of the past/future. A lot of my focus this year has been on forward looking activities, like career choices, financial planning, wealth creation, goal/mission setting and just thinking about the future in general. Personally, it's been quite a large hurdle to clear between uni life and work life. All of a sudden I've got all this money coming in, which opens up a myriad of possibilities for me; but on the other hand, suddenly all of life's great responsibilities don't seem all too far away. One of my fundamental goals has always been that I want to be financially free by the time I start a family. Not so much for the accumulation of all the fancy bells and whistles in life but just to be able to spend that quality time with the wife and kids without 'having' to miss out due to career/wealth building commitments. I think I only really realised this year that playing house with another person is EXPENSIVE. For a person to get married at my age, they'd have to get into debt for pretty much the rest of their lives to afford the modern essentials of a decent furnished house and a car or two. Not to mention just how costly a wedding is. Not to imply that it's not worth the money being paid of course, but I think a strong marriage and family is hard enough to maintain as it is, without the additional pressures that inevitably comes with needing to stave off that debt. So a little forward planning now, a lot of heartache saved later.
Having said that though, being the very extreme person that I am, I think I have gone a bit too far in looking ahead and doing things for the future that I've missed out on enjoying the moments in the present that I have. After all, all we can be really sure of having is the now moment - once gone it is gone forever. Even though planning for the future is healthy and definitely has its place in life, living now is really important as well. It's quite easy to get into the trap of always having my head thinking and thinking about what I'm going to do for the rest of the day, next week/month/year/decade, always looking forward but never really enjoying the present. Looking back at the last few months I can see that I've really tired myself out thinking about things all the time. I suppose it all comes down to living out a healthy balance between the two. Live too much for the present and you end up with an unprepared future, but live too much in the future and you miss out on living.
