The Answer To The Hectic Life

I did a nice beach road trip recently to some of the Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia beaches.  In my usual fashion of being active I packed the trip with cycling, running, kayaking, standup paddleboarding, a horrible attempt at traditional surfing, swimming, and some fishing to relax.

It was an amazing trip but I was excited to get home when it was over.  When I finally did get home, my stress-meter was instantly cranked up to 11 and things became hectic.

Shit-Show

Being that I travel with tons of gear and use it, I usually dread getting home from trips a bit.  My bike will be filthy, my kayak and paddling gear will be wet and stinky, my clothes the same.  Inevitably something will have broken on the trip (this time it was a skeg line on my kayak), and I’ll have gear to repair. 

These are first world problems for sure, actually problems of a playboy who likes to, well, play.  But I take care of my stuff and want it to last, so no matter how you look at it I still have to deal with these things. 

I was already dreading the unpacking process, but when I got to my house I was greeted with a shit-show.  While I was gone we had big thunderstorms that knocked branches off a tree which broke some of my fence boards.

My patio, which is my private outdoor shangri-la, was covered in debris, mud, and leaves. Meanwhile every ant in a 5 mile radius had apparently converged on my patio while I was gone and I had 8 or 9 massive ant hills.  They pull up the sand and base material below the pavers and create permanent damage, it looks like this.  

I was starting to get stressed but my fence and patio issues were just the start…

Hectic-fest

I then turned on my computer to find my internet was down.  After spending a good while trying to pinpoint the problem and checking if there were outages in my area using my cellphone I concluded that my modem had stopped working.  Wonderful.  

At this point I was starting to lose it a bit, so I needed to calm down.  I decided to unpack my gear as that was something I could at least control.  I went to my basement and found a modest infestation of crickets in my laundry room, jumping around as if they were sent there to mock me and my situation.  Delightful.

To cap off this now hectic and comical shit-show, a little while later I noticed there was a snake in the window well of my below ground basement window, on the outside of the house thankfully.  But I was still going to have to extricate the bastard. 

At this point I sort of felt like the Michael Douglas character in the movie “Falling Down“.  I was considering going on a rampage.  Well, not really but the thought crossed my mind for a second.  

The final straw… when I sifted through the pile of mail that had accumulated while I was gone I had a summons for jury duty.  It must have arrived right after I left as I was supposed to report the very next day.

Problems… Haha

Let me be clear, to those of you who have kids who occasionally break bones or a very sick parent or relative, these “bad” things I came home to that stressed me out probably make you laugh.  “Ha, big effing deal, try some real problems on buddy”, you may be thinking. 

I get it, and I’m not claiming these are major life problems.  But, these are the annoying stressors of life that constantly poke at us and sometimes pile up to make life a hectic mess.  And if you combine these stressors on top of bigger problems they can be the things that push us over the edge. 

At a minimum they can keep our stress and cortisol levels high enough to make us unhealthy and sick.  The comedy of problems I came home to from my vacation did stress me out a bit, but then I used my ace in the hole.

Multi-Tool

As I started planning out which problem I was going to deal with first, I reminded myself of my secret weapon.  “Dude, you only work 20 hours a week and have total control over when those hours happen.  And you’re financially independent.  This will be cake.” 

If I had still been working 45 hours a week and commuting these problems would have taken forever to get to.  And I would have addressed them in an exhausted, zombie state of mind late in the evenings after being beat down from another crappy day of work. 

But I was able to delay my return to work another two days and knock them all out in succession.  What was very hectic became no big deal in short order.  The one exception was the snake of course, I took care of him that night, before he found a way into the house. 

So this is a friendly reminder that when you’re having one of those days it should motivate you to focus on financial independence even more.  Because once you’re FI you can go part time like I did, or early retire completely.  Or you could start a lifestyle business where you control your own time, or simply volunteer and do what’s meaningful to you. 

And you’ll have plenty of time to deal with ants, snakes, crickets, broken fences, broken cable modems, and jury duty.