Balancing
Priorities and Prioritizing Balance:
How to make room for what
matters most in life
By JOSH MARTIN
Published by Josh Martin Ink at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Josh Martin
Also by Josh Martin:
Simple(ton) Living: Lessons in balance from life’s absurd moments
Available at http://www.joshmartinink.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
First
edition: August 2011
ISBN 978-0-9732933-7-1
Visit our website at http://www.joshmartinink.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
• My Story: This ain’t no detour
Section 1: Identifying Priorities
• Life Lessons—Shopping Carts and Laundry Rooms: Identifying what really matters in life
• Exercise 1: Reasons to Fight List
• Life Lessons—Mad River Madness: Going against the grain
• Life Lessons—Whipped in West Africa: Be smart, drink your wine
Section 2: Making Room
• Life Lessons—Catching a Train: The saving grace of simplifying
• Exercise 6: The Suitcase Scenario (Introduction)
• Life Lessons—Meghan and the Mud: Making room by letting go
• Exercise 6 continued: Suitcase Scenario (Application)
• Also available from Josh Martin
Reading this book cover-to-cover won’t take very long. By all means, feel free to read through the book in its entirety first to get an overall sense of the material. However, actually working through each of the seven exercises shouldn’t be rushed.
Deliberate living is a central theme in this book. At its core, Balancing Priorities and Prioritizing Balance is about deliberation. And deliberation takes time.
For example, you could set the goal of working through just one exercise per month. Allow yourself the space for true self-reflection. Move on to the next lesson only when you feel comfortable doing so. Take the time to really wrestle through some of the tough questions.
And that’s not to say you’ll need to lock yourself away from the rest of society as you get into things. Work through the exercises as you’re able. Think about the questions while you’re taking a shower or driving into work. Jot down ideas as they come to you during your lunch break. Spend an hour digging into the material after the kids have gone to bed.
And unlike most of the books on your shelf that you’ll never read again, this one is meant to be revisited often. Check in from time to time to tweak things or remind yourself of your goals and plans.
INTRODUCTION
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” – Henry David Thoreau
Dear reader:
You are going to die.
Now, please don’t take that the wrong way. I don’t mean it to be cruel or morbid. Rather, please take it as an empowering reminder of the short time you have in life and motivation to make the most of it.
I’m not psychic. I can’t tell you when you’ll kick the bucket. But then again, neither can you. I hope it’s not for many, many years. But for all you know the roof above your head could collapse right now and squash you like a bug before you reach the end of this paragraph…
…Assuming that hasn’t happened, I hope you’ll continue reading.
Recognizing and accepting the fact that the human experience has an expiry date is an important step. The next step involves taking action to ensure that when we do meet up with the inevitable, we are satisfied with how we got there.
This book will help you identify what matters most to you and then figure out how to build your life around it. The seven exercises encourage you to take a hard look at your life and to live more deliberately and strategically. There are two core components:
1. Identifying what really matters to you and what you want out of life (exercises 1-5).
2. Developing a strategy for making room for these priorities in your life (exercises 6-7).
It’s good to make plans for the future. But as you work through this book it’s important to note that there must always be room for flexibility and adaptability. Change is one of life’s few constants. Even the best laid plans go awry. By all means be deliberate in your life choices, but also be sure to leave wiggle room to go with the flow.
In the end, the ultimate goal of these exercises is to ensure you’re able to answer “Awesome” to the question, “When you are on your deathbed, how will you feel about how you spent your time?”
The Morbid Motivator,
Josh
MY STORY: THIS AIN’T NO DETOUR
It was January 2008 and I was 27 years old. An annoying blurriness in my left eye finally convinced me to see an optometrist. It turned out that the insides of my eyeballs were bleeding. That can’t be good, I thought to myself.
Turns out I was right.
A blood test at my family doctor the following week revealed some startling information. The normal amount of white blood cells in a healthy adult male ranges between 4 and 11. Mine? 584. Nope. Not good at all.
I had cancer. Chronic mylogenous leukemia to be exact. The doctors gave me a 40 to 50 percent chance of surviving. Later I found out the odds were more like 20 percent. Damn.
“You’ve got a journey ahead of you,” Dr. Merker said to me after giving me the news. A journey ahead of me. Fair enough. At least he hadn’t told me that I’d officially come to the end of the road.
I kept telling myself that this journey was just a detour. It was going to suck. But I would get through it and be back on track in no time.
Some of that was true. I did beat the odds and got through it. And yes, boy howdy, did it ever suck. But I failed to realize something at the time: this ain’t no detour.
A detour implies a deviation from the road you’re on; that you’ll eventually meet back up with that road at some point. This journey I found myself on wasn’t a detour though. It was a new direction altogether. And there was no going back to the ways things were.
Months of chemotherapy, radiation, a bone marrow transplant and a year living with virtually no immune system wasn’t fun. I experienced tremendous fear, anxiety, pain and a host of side-effects ranging from red urine to hallucinations of talking lobsters in my bed.
But through it all there emerged some profound lessons. Lessons about what really matters in life and the importance of making room for those priorities. Balancing like a tightrope walker between life and death for as long as I was brought into sharp focus a clichéd, yet important, truth: we don’t have a lot of time, so spend it well.
This journey has shaped me in many significant ways. It continues to shape me. I’ve beaten my cancer and I’m committed to making the most of my life. I hope this book will inspire you to do the same.
LIFE LESSONS
Shopping Carts and Laundry Rooms: Identifying what really matters in life
“We must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties which we assume only accessorize our days, are in fact here for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.” – Zach Helm
Waterloo, Ontario—It’s ten-thirty at night and I’m hurtling down a deserted street inside a shopping cart, like some hobo torpedo. As my mobile, metal coffin rattles down the road at mach five I suddenly realize something: I’m an idiot.
It had all started two minutes earlier. My friend Royce offered to push me to the local bar in a shopping cart that had been sitting in our driveway.
I was in university living in a dump of a student house on Marshall Street with five of my buddies. The furniture inside looked like Ikea’s transient cousin had thrown up in our living room. No one knew for sure if the vacuum cleaner even worked. And the festering pile of dishes in the sink was enough to make a billy goat puke.
Despite the squalor I knew I was getting into, the boys of Marshall Street had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—I could move in with them for only $100 a month. Of course, the hitch was I had to sleep in the laundry room. For a hundred bucks a month I’d have slept in the bathtub.
The only downside to living in a laundry room (besides the fact that you’re living in a laundry room) is having your roommates come in at all hours to run the washer and dryer. With five other people living in the decrepit shack, I was frequently lulled to sleep by the clanging and shaking of the over-worked washing machine.
You would think that the money I was saving as a result of my living arrangements would have inspired me to be a bit more carefree with spending elsewhere. What many people fail to realize about cheap folk like myself, however, is that such frugality spreads into every aspect of life. Much like the mould in the bathroom was spreading throughout the rest of the house.
And so, rather than spend the three bucks per person on a taxi, the gang always opted to walk to the bars on Saturday nights. And on the night of the shopping cart incident, in addition to being cheap, I was also too lazy to walk. And yes, too stupid to turn down an idiotic opportunity. I took Royce up on his shopping cart offer without a second thought.
I had known Royce for years, and considered him to be one of my best friends. Even so, as I climbed enthusiastically into that death trap on wobbly wheels, I should have known better. I sat in the shopping cart facing forward and cheered Royce on as he pushed me faster and faster down the darkened street. It didn’t take long for my courage to falter.