Lotto of a Lifetime

I've thought from time to time, what would my life pursuits be if I were not so consumed with maintaining my delicate balance of surviving? I do that most often when attempting to get my mind around winning the lotto. All of those petty little details that keep me moving through my day would be removed. I would no longer have to be attentive to making a living, as it were; by earning my keep. If the economic need were suddenly removed what would I spend my time doing?

  I would bring that topic to the table whenever the lotto pot got really big, like in the three digit millions.  It would annoy others when I’d continue to probe beyond obvious choices.

  “So what’d you do with all that money?”

  “Oh, I’d pay off all my debt”

  “And then what?”

  “Um, I’d buy a big house, and a car, yeah, an obscenely expensive car”

  “OK, and then what?”

  “Pay off all the debts of my mom and the rest of the family”

  “Sure; then what?

  “Travel the world”

  “OK, you do that for half a year and see every place you ever dreamed of, then   what?”

  “Um, I don’t know, set up college funds for all of my nieces and nephews, you know make sure everyone had what they wanted”

  “OK, let’s say all of that got done and you’ve spent all of two years doing that, then what would you do?”

Blank stare met by me sitting quietly smiling.

  “Oh screw you”

   The choices were often repeated, some went into a little more details of what they’d do in what order, but overall not by much. Point of this being beyond discovering a really neat tool to annoy others with, is that most of us are kept pretty busy with a relatively small list of necessities; and most of those revolve around lack.  We all have bills, but largely within our control, even if they’d require a concerted effort to retire, but they could be; and rather quickly~ if we didn’t continue to add to them.  Yet, by-and-large, we dream small.  Plus, those small dreams are so indescript and vague as to be really no dreams at all.  

A cabin in the woods when I retire was common amongst the guys I served with in the Army; a few of them actually followed through with that and purchased a cabin up in the mountains and lived a solitary life… for a year at best.  Just as travel, fishing, or fixing up the house all had an incredibly short shelf life before it was revealed to be incredibly boring.  It was true, I concluded, we identify with our struggles.  We define who we are by our lack.  We all had, at one time, life-time goals; but most of those had been used up by the age of 30.  Then there’s an oblique shift into maintenance of the status quo; with hopes there’s adequate fuel to make it to the finish line: retirement, where the fog of after-that exist without need to define.

   Once the race to retirement has been won, few have insight into anything more than a vague idea of what they’d like to do; for most they default to travel…where? They haven’t a clue.  Have they cultivated a language or appreciation of another culture to involve themselves with? Nope, it’s a fuzzy idea of possible choice much like winning the lotto.  As so many default into concluding, once they’ve spent all of the ready-at-hand reflex choices,
   “I’ll figure out what I will do once I get there”

We don’t plan because we forgot how to dream; or worst of conditions, we were too busy to continue to dream well.  For those that do dream, they can only dream in small ill-defined fashion.  

There’s impoverished, and then there’s destitute.  Lots of time is spent on discussing how to make a living, but scarcely anything is shown on how to live well.