It’s interesting how your priorities can change if you let them - by withdrawing fear. This is progress chomping away at its practical feast - your everyday life. Three weeks ago, I was concerned with attending meetings, managing paperwork at school, eating anything just to get by, and wanting to find a good fishing rod.

Right now, in this night filled with dark yet refreshingly cool air, I am relishing in the ideas of a diet without animals, wanting to be obsessed with writing a guide or book on fire dynamics simulator, contributing to the FDS project, lessening my negative impact on the world, and planning a way to integrate motorcycling trips into my (shortening) workweek. All of this, of course, along with succeeding in my remaining classes and developing a healthy fire protection society at my university. This concept of freedom develops from a mix of inputs involving running into interesting strangers, writing out your thoughts to develop stronger questions and approaches to your life experience, reading the vast amount of knowledge that surrounds us in the world, and other healthy mental dieting habits.

(Photo from Flickr user nouknouk)

This freedom that I am moving towards is what I want to make up life as I know it. The way I write can sometimes come across as plentifully vague - like deeply staring at a piece of abstract art trying to extract some meaning - yet its implications are endless in my thoughts, and hopefully yours. How long is the journey until your daily life becomes doing what you like to do 97% of the time? To me that is when the journey itself becomes the journey - there is no final stage.

Your priorities define what you “have time for”, which is really a phrase that masks the idea that you simply do what you want to do - constrained only by the time and schedule that you have invented and invested in. Time is flying by anyway, no matter your interests. I have the same time that you have, I have the interests pegged well enough for now - now I just need to turn that into some usable output that can affect the largest amount of people via value and substance - something for anyone to ingest in their mind.

I think the much-needed visit to the woods this past week/weekend was more important to me than I initially thought. Now, have a great day.