Monday Mood: Life is About Choices

We make choices in life, as long as we understand the consequences of our choices, as adults it is a human right to do so.  

I am always puzzled when people make choices that make them uncomfortable, frazzled,  or unhappy, when there were clearly other choices they could have made. 

At home, my bedroom, my space, is cluttered and dusty.  Not just a little dusty, but mostly dusty.  There are cobwebs along the bottom of the window.  I know that.  I know my mother would have felt compelled to dust, and clean.  She dusted and cleaned even when it was not needed, because you dusted once a week and vacuumed the floors a couple of times a week, every week, no matter how much you hated doing so, or how unhappy it made you. No one was forcing her to do so, my father never criticised her housekeeping, if anything in later years when her housekeeping came to resemble mine, he commented that the house was much more relaxed now. I chose to live with the dust, and go to the pool instead. The pool makes me happy, and that is my choice.  

40 years ago I showed up at the office in a wrinkled dress shirt, and caught hell from my boss for being a mess.  I started ironing shirts, I hated it.  It was a chore that took an hour a week, when I would have much sooner gone for a bike ride. There was a drycleaners and laundry on the corner with a sign in the window that advertised "executive shirt service" for 89-cents. I tentatively took in a couple of shirts.  They came back looking better than anything I could ever do.  Yes it cost $5 or $6 a week, but it freed up and hour to ride into downtown Orlando and back once a week.  I still don't iron.  I chose to pay for someone else to do something that made me unhappy.  They say money can't buy happiness, but it can free up time to do things that make you happy. I still send my dress shirts out to be washed, starched and ironed.  (I wear one or two a month these days.) 

When I was growing up on the farm we mowed over 5-acres of grass between the two houses, the farm buildings and the pond.  My grandfather's health started to fail when I was about 14, and the duty fell to me. Even with a small tractor to do the job, I hated it.  It was noisy, it made me sneeze endlessly.  After I moved away the mowed area dropped to about one acre.  When I built my first house, I bought a lawn mower.  I still hated it, but it kind of had to be done. About 3 years later, I hired the hippy-dippy lawn service to cut it. He did the lawns for our offices, and I was living in the community with one of the offices in it.  He did a great job, when we was out of jail.  And it freed me to do things I enjoyed, like go for a nice run. 

A lot of chores on people's have to do list, are not really essential to living well. Or could easily be done by someone else. If they don't bring you happiness, why do you do them? Can the chore be ignored? Can you get someone to do them? No one ever lays on their deathbed saying, I wish I had dusted and ironed more.