Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
I hope that your day is full of family, friends, and good food. Enjoy this holiday and take a moment to be truly thankful for everything you have been given.
I’ll keep today’s post short and leave you with the following quote:
If you would like some more inspiration for this holiday, check out some of our previous posts!
“Clutter is not just physical stuff. It’s old ideas, toxic relationships, and bad habits. Clutter is anything that does not support your better self.”
-Eleanor Brownn
It’s amazing the amount of physical unconsciousness that can surround us in life…simply because of the wild card of “sentimentality” that we can often play.
I have to admit that I’m one who can fall into that trap, either by abdicating responsibility and claiming my upbringing as shaping me that way (mawkish “stuff” all over the house; Dad’s shed full of everything he “might need one day”) or my zodiac proclivity as a sentimental Leo. Yet, sooner rather than later in moving into midlife, I’m onto the seductive design of the trap and at least on the way to one day claiming “that gig is up!”
I can be grateful for both a partner coming into my life who leans toward the practical and dispassionate as well as a growing sense of what it will take to become a true Back Forty Freedom Flier.
Whether my mother encouraged me to hold onto items because I might want to “look at them when I get old” or my father was the garage and shed black-hole filler does not determine my Big Game Back Forty Future…if I get and remain conscious.
To live inside of the philosophy that “the best is yet to come and, babe, won’t it be fine” as well as the belief that “I have yet to do what I came here to do” means that my eyes, ears, environments, mind and heart must be forward-focused vs. rear-view-mirror fixed. Living in that paradigm requires being nimble, quick, light and bright…without the weight (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) of past, past, past globbing onto me at every turn.
I don’t need to watch 10 episodes of Hoarders or even to memorize and recite all passages of “The Japanese Art of Tidying Up” in order to awaken my need for Back Forty above-the-surface oxygen. These tools may serve to initially inspire me, but the critical and necessary ocular redirect toward what is in front of me (in life, purpose, passion, play) vs. what has taken place behind me is the key action to take.
Dropping past-based ballast and replacing with future-focused environmental influences creates lightness and directional guidance. Exchanging the diploma for a dream board? Substituting an old picture with a graphic plan? Swapping a souvenir for a framed list of intentions? All are ways to detach from the lines so that our Back Forty Balloon can gain the altitude and attitude for a second half/best half impact.
“The true heart of organizing is about gaining your freedom.”
-Unknown
It’s bad, right? After all, the definition of crisis is a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger. How could something dangerous or intensely difficult possibly be good?
What if I told you that a crisis can actually be a great thing and that you should be thankful for all of the crises in your life that you have endured?
Take a moment to read this quote:
Now, take some time to really think about it. All of the crises you have ever gone through have brought you where you stand today. Think about all of those crises as experiments used to learn new things about yourself and your life. What have you learned?
Maybe you learned about what you value in a life partner through a particularly nasty breakup. Or maybe you learned that a particular field of work just isn’t for you after losing a job that you were too scared to leave. Whatever crises you have gone through, I believe that they have all been for the best.
When you think about it, really think about it, would you take back any of those crises if you could? Would you take back the knowledge that you gained or the opportunities that your crises have brought you? I know that I wouldn’t.
So that is my challenge to you this week:
As Thanksgiving draws closer, thoughts of turkey and stuffing are beginning to fill our heads. For me, another dish that comes to mind is scalloped oysters.
As I was growing up, my parents made scalloped oysters every year for Thanksgiving. Imagine my surprise when I realized that oysters were not a standard dish at everyone’s Thanksgiving table.
So this year, I thought I would share my family’s tradition with all of you. Maybe I can even inspire you to bring something new to your family’s table this Thanksgiving!
Look through the recipe below:
“If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.”
-Wendy Mass
Things are going to change. Jobs will be gained and lost. Loves will be embraced and released. Businesses will thrive and dissolve. Residences will be moved into and out of. Health, finances, plans, will go this way and then that.
Change is the thing we aren’t naturally programmed for because the internal, stay-safe, survival mechanisms are geared to kick in when “different” shows up.
Let’s say you usually spend all day in an office. Boom! Layoff, and you’re now home. Or you’ve been in a relationship for years. Boom! It breaks up. Or, yes, even those who haven’t been in a relationship for years…Boom! You’re in one!
We can go through the above scenarios for any aspect of life. The question is: how to adapt most effectively.
The first hurdle is the commitment to actually adapt. Many hold onto the old system, pattern, situation like a child attached at the hip to a parent on the first day of kindergarten. We’ve probably all read “Who Moved My Cheese?” and yet a commitment to embrace and adapt to change isn’t always our first reaction.
The second element is to understand and embrace agile. Agile is not only a descriptive of someone nimble and quick, but a term used in the world of software development where the focus is on quick adaptation based on short and regular reassessments of the situation and what is wanted and needed. But they get the product out NOW…not when it’s perfected.
There’s a lot of relevance to this concept for our own lives in The Back Forty. Guess what? Shift happens! And it tends to take on greater seeming impact and significance as we move into the second half of life.
Taking on the agile way in which those in the first half – the 18, 20, 25yr olds – simply play and learn and play and learn some more can support us who have “been around the block a few times” loosen up, commit to adapt, and by God even start to have fun with it!
Giving up the expectation that anyone or anything will stay the same or that, in adapting, we’ll “get it right the first time” allows us the patience to stay on the playing field…with an emphasis on “play“.
Try a new approach? Conduct an experiment? Design a new context within which to hold it all? Any of these can be forward-falling directions to take so as to flow with the shifting winds of life. And falling forward fast is what will get us doing what we came here to do…not waiting until everything is stable.
Where can you bring playful and agile adaptation to changing plans, people and places in your Back Forty world today?
“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent.”
-Bill Gates
The other day I stumbled across a unique ad and immediately decided that I needed to write an article about it. It was a relatively new way to solve an age-old problem.
For thousands of years, families have lived under one roof. Children, parents, grandparents, and sometimes even aunts, uncles, and cousins used to live in one home. This tradition evolved into the “in-law suites” that were so popular in the early 1900s. However, in-law suites lost their appeal in the late 1940s, after WWII, which has added to the increase in retirement homes.
More and more often families are thrown on opposite sides of the country, and when the older generation gets too old to take care of themselves they are put in a retirement home. It seems that the days of many generations living under one roof is gone.
Enter Next Gen Homes. These homes took the idea of the in-law suite and brought it into the 21st century. These homes are literally two homes under one roof. There is the main residence which is connected to the smaller home with a wraparound porch. The smaller home includes a kitchen, living area, bedroom, bathroom, laundry room, and even it’s own garage.
The company selling these homes (Lennar) are trying to show the flexibility that comes with this style of home. One family turned the smaller residence into a music studio, others invited parents or children to live with them. Click here to find out more.
So this leads me to my final question, and I hope that you comment below! Would you live in a Next Gen home? Would you invite your parents? Your children? Turn it into a workshop/business? What do you think of this re-invention of the in-law suite? Let me know!
So many people think that they don’t have control over their future once they find themselves in the midst of midlife. We want to change all of that.
The Back Forty teaches that:
“The only way you will ever be able to create your own radical future of play, passion, and purpose is by enabling yourself to have a say over how life will go from here on out.”
– Darrell Gurney, Co-Founder of The Back Forty
Take a moment to think about that. How many times have you caught yourself thinking that you are who you are or that you can’t change the path of your life?
The Back Forty teaches that you have a say over how your life will go. You can control your future, if you just take the time to invest in it. The second half of your life can be full of playfulness, passion, and purpose. You just have to decide that you want it to.
Veterans Day. Everyone knows it and everyone knows that the day is used to thank veterans for their service. But how many people actually know the history behind why we celebrate it?
President Woodrow Wilson declared the first Armistice Day in remembrance of the end of WWI (which took place a year earlier).
Congress requested annual proclamations calling for the observance of November 11th.
Armistice Day was officially declared a legal holiday as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace”.
President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the idea that Armistice Day should celebrate all veterans, not just those who died in WWI. President Eisenhower had been given this idea by a WWII veteran in 1945 before he became president.
Congress amended the law to replace “Armistice” with “Veterans” which leads us to the Veterans Day we know today.
So how are you celebrating Veterans Day today? Are you taking a moment to remember all veterans who have served our country? Maybe you can think about just how much our country has gone through. Or maybe you just thank the veterans in your life.
“Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding.’”
– Werner Heisenberg
We often hear the terms “game face” and “poker face” as to the countenance we are to assume when moving into particular arenas and what we want to accomplish while on the field.
But what about when we are placed on playing fields we don’t understand and, therefore, don’t know what we want to accomplish…or even IF there is something to accomplish there?
I’m speaking of that great and mostly avoided turf called “the unknown”.
We avoid any opportunity to play those games like the plague! Especially as we move into the latter, second-half years of life by when we have made LOTS of decisions as to who we are, how the world is, what’s really possible for us and our life, etc.
We tend to make permanent residence in the comfortable and known, because we’ve played (our safety-seeking voice says) “too much or too haphazardly in the past and got hurt, burned or, sure as hell, didn’t look good.” Failure and its cousins – such as not looking good, making a mistake, appearing to not already “know” how to do something – become not only unwelcomed guests but wanted-poster criminals to be shot on site.
The Back Forty is founded on a philosophy that we (the Founders) and you have yet to do what we came here to do. No matter what we may have achieved in the first half of life, we say our biggest hand and most purposeful game is yet to be played.
On that playing field, we suggest that Faith-Face is the countenance to assume while playing, and that looking for and diving into “the unknown”s of ourselves, our world and what’s possible for us is where the score really matters.
If you’re really playing a Back Forty Big Game as your future, you will want to explore who you are beyond the decisions you’ve made from life’s first half of research and development. You’ll want to question the fixedness (can you say atrophy?) that comes from attitudes about people and the world that you arrived at from the game’s bumps and bruises. And you’ll want to give your Self the opportunity to discover – from all of that first half R & D – your Formula of Unique Self Expression (FUSE) that only you could concoct given the particular life and times you’ve led.
We say that everything that has occurred, is occurring, or will occur in your life are the PERFECT and EXACT elements necessary to position you to be or do what you came here to be or do.
So, approaching the absolutely requisite unknown with Faith-Face forward is the quickest way to capitalize on your research.
Where can you embrace and faith-face the unknown in your life and times today? For what reason is life EXACTLY the way it is right now to enable you to be and do what you came here to be and do?
Join us in this exciting exploration into the unknown of what lies in your own Back Forty. It’s time to be surprised at what you’ve discovered about your Self.
“It would be wonderful to think that the future is unknown and sort of surprising.”
– Alan Rickman
The words “middle age” have been searched on Google over 8,400 times in the past 24 hours in the US. People are asking so many questions, but the overreaching question seems to be “what is middle age?”.
As simple as this question seems, it has so many additional meanings. When people ask what middle age is, they are also asking what ages are considered middle age and what the definition of middle age is. Ultimately, they want to know if they are middle aged.
Middle age, an age no one seems to want to be. Once you are middle aged you are no longer young, you are boring, you are no longer fun, you are old, and you are no longer cool. The stigmas can go on and on. But is that really true? I hear so many of my friends who are technically middle aged saying, “but I don’t feel middle aged!”
Well let’s start with the definition. According to the Oxford English Dictionary middle age is “The period after early adulthood and before old age, about 45 to 65”. Not terribly specific – so why is middle age met with so much dread?
There seems to be this preconceived notion that once you hit middle age, the best is all behind you. I disagree with this wholeheartedly. I believe that middle age has the potential to be the best years of your life. There is a concept made popular by The Back Forty that states that the first half of your life is just research and development and that the best is yet to come.
So take the first step towards making the second half of your life the best half and download the Top Ten Tips for Life’s Radical Second Half by clicking on the link below!