How do you attain personal mastery (discipline) that results in a better life — more time for health, hobbies and friends?
Many people are stuck in their day jobs, wondering about the freedom that is unattainable. How many people can deal with downward mobility, and survive on the bare minimum?
Recently, I went down the path of the unconventional. Taking the road less travelled and exercising discipline is the key to freedom. By exercising discipline, I realised what is essential and what is extraneous. I started to cut down greatly on my non-essential spending. Most importantly, I cut what’s known as stress spending.
Stress spending happens when I work in a high stress environment, and need to turn to retail therapy – in particular food – to comfort myself, and make myself feel better. This resulted in poorer health and with time, caused me to lose self-control over my health. The weight gain caused it hard for me to exercise and also led to a vicious cycle of further weight gain.
Now, I’m more cognizant of the importance of maintaining good health, and also in being more disciplined. With discipline, life is on the contrary easier, as we exercise more self-control over aspects of our lives that used to spin out of control. As a hedonist, this was not easy to learn. But with some hard-hearted adjustments in life, I’m slowly acquiring this skill set again.
A simple life is one where we can enjoy freedom from most forms of enslavement. Also, I’m surprised that by making a trade-off in life, we stand to gain so much more on what we have previously missed out on, such as the time and freedom to pursue our hobbies.
Speaking of hobbies, I have this friend who is like me. She loves reading and practising her musical instrument, learns French and jogs daily. She is indeed an inspiration to me! I love reading and also learn German, try to jog more but I’m not able to fit music playing into my schedule.
I had a Long debate with a friend on whether we would enjoy our hobbies as much if they turned into practical skills or day jobs, and whether we should pursue hobbies that can be translated into work — most people do so for pragmatic reasons, thus not many people pursue hobbies for sheer pleasure. I was of the conclusion that the gist was to continue learning — “the educator ME”, and enjoy the process of learning new skills, be they hobbies or practical skills for work.
This brings me to my ultimate point about friends. As I get older, and with my birthday just past, I noticed that there are friends who remember your birthday (and that’s especially heartwarming), some of whom you will talk to regarding hobbies and philosophy, and others with whom you will share snippets/screenshots of readings. Friends for different seasons I suppose, but all these attest to the importance of friends for sharing different aspects of our lives. It is funny how we ‘select’ different friends to share different aspects of our lives with.
Freedom to pursue time with hobbies and friends is what I relish. Hence, taking the road less travelled by converting discipline to freedom is my present emphasis in life, and safeguarding this freedom with a discipline to excel will be my next exploration.
