A New Dawn
“Life must be lived forward but can only be understood by looking backward.”
I read the book ‘The Genius Myth‘ last year and every line just jumps off the page at me! I have never highlighted a book so much! It says all of the things I intuitively know about life but have never quite heard stated so clearly. I had to take breaks often just to digest the information. This book has given me so much to reflect on. Much of it just reminds me of what I always tell new tiny house builders, ‘trust yourself. If you think this lifestyle will help you, I believe you. It’s all figure-out-able but listen to that voice in your soul, it knows more about you than anyone else.’
For the last several years, in this world of media and this accidental leadership role I have found in the tiny home realm, I have such an internal struggle. I keep trying to find what ‘my purpose’ is. Even when I was building my house (14 years ago!), I said I wanted to give a TED Talk but even then, when my WHOLE world was this house, I knew it wasn’t about the house. Tiny homes are not ‘my mark’. Tiny homes are just a path I used to figure out what ‘my mark’ is going to be.
Going forward
I still don’t know what my mark on the world will be but I do see how my life is building to something. And I know it is something important. Important is a relative term. I don’t mean I will ever be world renowned, but I might just impact someone who is, that’s plenty. I know I have important things to share. But, like all things of note, I think that happens most profoundly at the local level. For a while that has happened between me and my kids but occasionally I get to reach out a little further. I’m finding I am having the need to share wider again so I’m relooking at all that.
Opportunity Costs
You know how everything has a price? The amount of dollars it would cost. Well everything also has an opportunity cost, too. The amount of other things you cannot choose if you choose this path. That’s a pretty important metric. I think we’d all be doing the world a favor to consider opportunity costs more intentionally going forward. Not to be cryptic but it feels like our world is making a pretty significant shift right now and I’m worried the implications aren’t fully understood. I’m talking about politics and beyond. AI is a significant part of life right now and growing. We are all freely feeding the machine and barely even know it.
The opportunity costs of using social media are expensive for the individual. Information shared ceases to belong to the person who shared it. For these reasons I’ve gone pretty quiet on social media while I process this shift and how it will impact my life going forward.
Social media has been how I communicate and keep in touch with family for years but I’m having a hard time knowing that anything I post there can be sold or used, potentially against me. I don’t really care about marketing and sometimes enjoy an algorithm knowing me well enough to answer my questions before I know to ask them. But with AI figuring out the human monster, it no longer feels safe to lay it out there on a platform that belongs to someone else.
So, I find myself researching IP laws once again these days. I’m glad I have this website as my own place to do these updates. I’ll likely share the link to these updates to social media as a way to update but the information will remain mine. Since this website is far more public than my locked down social media accounts, I’m going to have to work through some privacy issues when it comes to oversharing about my kids’ lives.that’s for me to figure out though.
In the meantime
Life has been a winding road. I have big concerns with the IRC Tiny House Standard the committee has been working toward. There is a closing window in which they may still be able to address my concerns, otherwise my efforts will shift from helping the effort to stifling the effort. It’s been a giant time suck of 2024 as I have given over a month of full time work hours to meetings with very little progress. Still, I don’t regret the time, it was necessary to fully understand the effort and goals. Like I’ve said before, sometimes just stopping a bad thing from happening IS still progress. I had hoped good could come from it but it’s not feeling like that will be what happens. We’ll see.
The kids are great, Hazel is rocking school, making friends and balancing the shift with grace. Every progress report is straight A’s but all of her real learning has been based around her social quotient. She still loves it and has yet to have to be woken up. She wakes up excited to go every morning. I cannot imagine having a school experience like that but I’m so glad she is. Miles is getting pretty curious about it and thinks he might want to try it out. He still loves sleeping in and we have finally found a work flow that feels good for him and I. For months, I felt like our homeschool was failing him because it was so different without Hazel. We seem to have worked through it but it’s still not nearly as magical as when we had Hazel to bounce off of, too.
He’s so self driven in his schooling anyway that it has me twiddling my thumbs quite a bit. I keep toying with the idea of how some more structured work could interlock with my life again. Options abound! We’ll see how it all shakes out.
James is rocking his work and has had a lot of very high profile clients this last year. We’re still going to break ground soon on our eventual house but I think this year we’re going to focus on remodeling his triplex, it’s in dire need of an update in the unit upstairs. If we can get to some of our house, that will be great, too.
We had some lovely holidays with family and hope you did too! It’s exciting to see each day getting just a little bit longer, whispers of bustling are in the distance but we’re very much still in the wintering phase; reading books, thinking thoughts and resting deeply!
