“Change doesn’t happen because of how we invest our money. Change happens because of how we invest our human energy, and it always has since we came down from the trees.
Everyone’s got a margin of discretionary energy — ten percent, twenty percent — that isn’t used up making their way in the world. That’s the energy that’s available for social change.”
Daniel Taylor of Future Generation. Via.
How do you use your energy, and how much do you have left to help us move on to a next, more sustaining level?
Managing energy is one of the most important thing in our current times – we must each day, more and more, consciously choose to whom and how we’ll share this precious resource, our energy, which was for years sucked out without us noticing.
Managing energy means to carefully select our activities, manage our time, our health, our creativity. As a freelance or full time worker, it is a question we’re all facing: how much money are worth your hours? How much money is worth your energy? Your health and well being? Are all these hours worked really worth? Is there not a more creative and healthy way to spend your time and energy?
Among the most common time and energy sucking activities are an employer needing you more than 35 hours per week, friends or family meetings leaving you empty, shopping in a quest to find something that will fill the emptiness, over cleaning the house every week inside and outside, and tv watching.
All this precious time could be used in a creative way, to make small and big changes.
As i wrote some days ago, our present culture does not emphasize free and quiet time. Instead, we are pushed to fill the agenda until there is not a minute left to be alone in silence, or to have some time to think and take new actions, on a personal or community level, towards a brighter future. Having a lot of free time might be seen as not usual, wrong, as if someone would be out of a system, not worthy, slacking and even depressed.
You must ask yourself, who is ruling your life?
Become your own authority, be more aware of where and how you want to spend your energy, your health, and your time. We’ll all have to make choices, what will yours be?
« L’ordre social vous apprend à vous taire, il ne vous apprend pas le silence. »
– Jean Baudrillard
En effet, c’est assez bien résumé, merci Éric!
Becoming a master of your time becomes imperative when you have been diagnosed with a serious illness as I have. I now reject all forms of time wasting, including working in the “normal” sort of way to chart a brave new world for myself. I have never felt so much freedom! Constant on my mind is: how do I want to spend the rest of my life? What can I contribute? What pleases me? What gives me joy?