My Life’s Work

So what happens when you’ve made your money. When the debts are paid and the holidays are where you want them and you can eat out every night if you want to. And the kids go to a “nice” school. And you have conversations about the 2.2ltre or the 3.0litre being the best, but the 3.0 litre doesn’t have the two tone leather option.

THIS is what you worked so hard for so long for?

Talkin’ bout a revolution.

With so many people blogging these days it’s not going to be long before we realise that values and beliefs and a plan will replace getting and keeping and getting more stuff.  Because everyone is a publisher these days, and the internet will tell us when we’re being a dick, we will start to notice a new set of guides and pointers that suggest there’s more to life than two tone leather on the 3.0 litre.

I realised my cause quite a while ago – probably too late for my plan to make a HUGE dent in the space-time continuum, but earlier than many of my peers.  My cause is defined day to day by my instincts. It helps me make honest decisions about stuff and tells me where the horizon is when we’re bobbing around like a cork on a sea of corporate whimsy. Like most days.

People react in a variety of different ways to someone with a cause.  Those with a cause themselves have a knowing look and want to share theirs and you often get into long passionate conversation with them and you almost always learn something. And it’s fun.

Those without a cause relax in the knowledge that they have managed to get the 3.0 litre WITH the two tone leather because they know a guy at the dealership. I mean, it was expensive but hey, you can’t take it with you huh? 

They look at you like you are selling something.  Which, in a way, you are. But you don’t want money in return, you just want to change the world, that’s all.  And it needs changing, because this shit can’t carry on and it’s not helping anyone and you’re the guy to do it. Or at least one of them.

Maybe they’re confused because they can’t see how chasing your cause can ever be profitable (their only measure of what works).  They think it’s quite quaint though, and lovely that someone is doing something – if only THEY had the time to “get involved”.  I think that they might have a nagging feeling that there’s a parallel universe where they don’t NEED the bloody car and it’s not important. But then they’d have to think of a cause. And that means letting something of yourself out, and although they can build shopping centres (or at least design the cable trunking systems), they could never do that.

So one day when the kids have left home and the car is long gone and they are trying to choose some slippers, they’ll have time to wonder what it was all for.  But I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. I have shit to DO baby…and the pain of doing it is far less than the pain of NOT doing it, believe me.