The G.I.F.T. of Life
Even before I started experimenting with more efficient sleep-schedules, my answer to a typical “What’s your hobbies?” question often met with incredulity and cries of outrage at the laws of physics I must be violating. But I’ve said all my life (well, excepting those first babbly years), You have time for what you make time for. And that’s not a flippant statement and it’s not an appeal to magick…it’s just the truth about how human beings work.
As Hemingway puts it, “The shortest answer is to do the thing.” People without many hobbies often find the time for several hours of TV a day, all while complaining that if only they had more time, they’d…But I got lucky, because I learned this lesson very young, from my workaholic father. It’s not how much time you’ve got; it’s where you put it…FIRST.
Thomas Jefferson (who made my list of activities look positively bleak) once
said something like, “Strive to never be idle, for the person who never
wastes time never complains about not having enough.” (Jefferson has an awesome life-story and probably the best collection of quotes out there, if you’re curious. I’m always amazed that he’s not quoted more!)
And the same is true, I’m learning, for money. Money that you hold tends to drip slowly off into things like drinks, trinkets, burgers, baubles, etc. The way to get your money spent on the things that are important to you is to spend it there. The same is true for savings…if you don’t put the money in savings, it’ll never be there, and you’ll always find one more thing to do with it first. I’m nothing if not living on a shoestring, but I consider saving important, so saving gets done first. If I’m so broke that I have to spend the money I already saved, then so be it; but if I’m not, then it got saved. (And it’s a lot harder to spend that money after you’ve saved it than before!)
I guess a better way to say it is that the trick to spending — time or money — is to put it where you most want it FIRST, before stashing any away as “extra”. It’s tempting to hoard a few hours at the end of the day, or a few dollars from your paycheck, “just to have”. But if you do that, then it won’t go where you want it to; it’ll just get frittered away. Spend it!!
So anyway, all this preamble is to introduce something new I’m (finally) doing: Donations. My boy and I kept talking about how many things we’d like to be able to make at least a small donation to, but we always feel like we can’t. Well, based on my theory, it’s not that we can’t; it’s that we don’t. So a few months ago I said That’s it, maybe I can’t see an extra thirty bucks in our monthly budget, but I bet if we spend it up front — give it priority — then I bet we find out that what doesn’t get bought instead is something much less important.
I call it “G.I.F.T.” — Give It to Fun Things. It’s a stupid acronym, but as long as there are major corporations out there with worse ones, I’m not stressing the quality of my acronyms much. ;)
Anyway, while my list of things to toss a little (I wish it was more, but being realistic it just can’t be) money at is huge, a lot of it IS for things I consider fun…free software projects I’d like to support, conservation efforts, stuff like that. But the “Fun” in G.I.F.T. doesn’t refer to the purpose of the spending so much as the fact that I know we’ll have fun doing it, because — duh — this kind of thing feels good.
Today it feels particularly good, because That Time came around, and I stumbled right on exactly where I wanted to give it, and I did.
Now I’m going to plug it for everyone else.
If you’re not familiar with Hopeline, they’re the people who run 1-800-SUICIDE, a service that saves countless lives every day. I know someone who used to volunteer for them, and they’re amazing people doing an amazing service for humankind. They provide “someone to talk to” 24/7 to people mired in suicidal thoughts, plus access to emergency psychiatric services when needed. And you wouldn’t believe for how many people, every single day, that basic offering makes the difference between life and death.
Hopeline is now facing down a Government effort to replace them with a Government service that will a) send the police instead of emergency psychiatric help, and b) will not guarantee anonymity. If this happened, almost no-one would use the service, and we’d lose a huge resource that we need in this world…remember, a lot of geniuses and generally spectacular people have been suicidal. Suicidal thoughts and tencencies are common in people who “don’t fit in”, which often means they’re different or better in ways that ought to be defended, or at least not snuffed out by indifference or intolerance.
Anyway, I just gave this month’s G.I.F.T. to help save Hopeline, and I hope some of you will, too. Last I checked, they were over 70% of the way to being able to save the program that’s saved so many others.
(If anyone’s interested, I might be coaxable on the point of also posting other places that receive my G.I.F.T. money…but if not, I probably won’t. Unless it’s urgent — as it is in the case of Hopeline — it seems squicky to me to air where my donations go. Like bragging, maybe? I dunno; it’s Monday, and I wrote a 10-page paper in one day over the weekend, so forgive me a little brainfry, eh?)
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I had never heard of hopeline before and your G.I.F.T. theory sounds like a good idea. I’ve read in a few books about Austrian Economics that say we only do what we choose to do. Therefore if we can’t ever find the time for a hobby it is, in fact, because we have chosen to do something else. I really enjoy the fact that we are directly responsible for the day-to-day outcome of our lives. Thanks for the insightful blog.
Thank you for reading, liking, and being public about it! Austrian Economics is by far the oddest place I’ve ever heard of support for one of my theories! ;)