Question:
If you could do anything you wanted… every day… for the rest of your life…
How would you spend your days?
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J
I would want to build things everyday. My dream is to have a home work shop. Full work space where if I need to work I can work from home.
G
Learning and teaching
T
That’s a big question. How would I spend my days. I think the first thing I would do is revel in the freedom that I could do whatever I wanted and change my mind as much as I wanted. That would be the most freeing and wonderful thing for me. Like, the idea that I could reinvent myself as often as I wanted? What a concept!
Without question, I know that I would get up and walk or exercise every single day. It really fills me up. I love being outside and I love moving my body. I might even have a ritual, like biking to coffee or something. I don’t know. I do know that I would exercise every day.
Next, I probably would take classes in either immigration law or farm workers rights, or child advocacy. And then I would use my time to help those groups. Assuming I don’t have to worry about money any longer, I would love to leave my Marc in that manner.
I think I would like to work three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. That would give me four days to work on all the things I love, like writing, making things and enjoying friends and long weekend travels and things like that.
K1
Two thing: one start a non profit that helps victims of molestation & rape with the right therapy modalities that reprogram the brain with trauma, resources to help them get jobs housing etc & paddle.
And maybe travel.
K2
Meditation, surf, psychedelics, sex, eat, dance, sleep, repeat
M
So yeah, I contemplated this walking today and what occurred to me was less about things and more about like specifics and more about the the nature of the activities and kind of came up with four buckets that I think I’d want to balance.
One is sustain and that can be, you know, sleep, eat, exercise, sustain ongoing friendships, family relationships, my home, you know, things that just require sustaining.
Second is building that can be areas of life that I want to give sustained attention to help grow something. And I think that’s where there’s an expectation that it’s not always going to be fun, right, like things with the dance company, right, that I have to remind myself sometimes, as I learned from my Cuban friends, sometimes to get to the things you want, you have to do things you don’t like, you know, because you’re doing administrative work or grant writing or whatever, you know, the things that aren’t just getting to dance and, you know, I can’t just snap my fingers and be at the Joyce Theater on stage, right, I need to take steps to get there. But I want to build towards some things.
So that’s a category that can also be relationships. And there also might be some relationships or activities where sometimes it’s in a building mode and sometimes it’s in a sustaining mode or repairing mode.
But anyway, then the third category would be explore. And I think the idea
of having things that are new or different or interesting, that doesn’t mean you’re going to, you know, go back to X country every year, or that I need to become an expert kitesurfer or a rock climber, but that I might enjoy getting to explore doing different things or different places and having novelty. I think in creating space for novelty.
And then the final category of service. So ways to be in service to others to the environment of thinking about how do I create space for other people to equally be able to explore their joy and passion. And sometimes that can mean simply the elimination of harm, right. So I’m starting to dive back into some of the work again on private prisons and immigrant detention, right. And just like, what does it take for people to be able to walk freely on the earth as a baseline. And then we get into, you know, higher up on the Maslow’s hierarchy in terms of what we can enable for other people in the way that I have so many, so many privileges.
So yeah, I think what was interesting in this question is that I’m not far off from those personally, but I think my balance is very screwy. And part of that is from the need at this moment to produce income, even though for me that’s mostly tied to service work. So it’s a funny thing. It’s not that I want to be serving people less. But I think there’s some elements of my work job that are not the way that I would want to be of service necessarily, even if they do help people.
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Me
I would spend it with people I love doing things with them that I love doing. Dancing, building, listening to music, traveling… I would teach and learn.
I would find ways to smile a lot… and find ways to bring smiles to those that I love and care for.