Sing First. Then Do The Boring Stuff

Sing first. Then do the boring stuff.

 (This post originally appeared in January 2011 on my previous blog)

Hey folks breaking out of your moldy molds,

I just responded to a tweet on twitter with the above sentence. And it hit me like a giant idea log, “good blog post title.”

Way too much of life is backwards. It makes no sense.

Are you carving time out of your must do life to actually do something you’d like? Seriously, who made up this script we’re all following? If it were a movie, no one would venture into the theaters to see it, the screenwriter would be out of work and there wouldn’t be any sequels. 

Make time for the life you want to remember at the end of your life.

I hate to get morbid here, but we squander most of our precious lives doing stuff most of us don’t even care about. We’ve been trained to do that, to stand in line at the post office obediently without speaking up to say, “Can you get some more help out here?” We’ve been trained to sit at desks and “learn,” as if you can’t learn scampering through the woods with your dad looking at the inside of flowers or something you choose for yourself. (Highly recommend Weapons of Mass Instruction. I even donated a copy to my local library.) Think about it — we sit at desks most of the sunny day starting at a wee age for TWELVE YEARS. (Some schools are canning recess completely and schools are being built-playground free.)

No wonder the body breaks down. It wasn’t mean to be rigid like that or our parts wouldn’t move. Then if we or our parents agree to fork over $150,000+, we get to sit at more desks for four more years. That’s followed – usually for another twenty-five years – by more desk sitting. (Unless you are a teacher, then you get a choice to sit or stand.)

If someone said to you at age 5, are you willing to spend the bulk of your life sitting at a desk ingesting things/doing things someone else chooses for you, you’d think they were crazy, right? wrong?

Here’s an idea. Round up all the boring stuff you  usually put at the top of your spirit-numbing to do list and move it down to the bottom. Now you can sing …

What do you feel about the script you follow? Do you write your own, follow a hybrid?