Observations: Pocket Change & The Necessity of Reinvention

I think it is periodically necessary in our lives to reinvent ourselves. As I was wandering through my morning rituals I remembered one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare:

"Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!"-Wm. Shakespeare, Henry V

As we move through our lives we are often changed by those experiences. Think of each experience of life as a coin of change. We have many pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars* that we accumulate and put in our change jar.

In time, that jar becomes heavier and heavier with the coins of our lives. It can begin to weigh us down. Since it is a gradual process we often do not even notice it at first, but we eventually reach the point where we realize the weight of life that we are carrying.

Each of those coins represents the sum total of us and each holds some value - but, clearly, some hold more value than others. We reach points in our life where were need to sit down and sort out our coin jar, if for no other reason than to lighten our load a bit.

But we tend to save memories and experiences for a rainy day, for a "just in case", and as we sort through them we can often think of more reasons to keep them then to spend them and let them go.

It would be nice if there was a CoinStar** for our lives, where we could take the change jar of experience, pour it in, listen to the whirring and the clanking, watch the experiences get totaled up, and then the device would return to us a slip of paper (light, convenient) that was the sum of us, that we could then take to the cashier and restart the entire process of refilling our coin jar with new experiences. Just simply cash in the old experiences and start over gathering new ones.

I am a huge advocate of the necessity of taking a personal inventory periodically. In my case, I do it very literally. I will take a month of time (for me, a month is sufficient detail to truly look at my patterns and habits) and then keep a very detailed running journal of what I am doing, usually in hour long increments. Do it for thirty days and it will give you a surprising view of your life. (At least it always seems to surprise me.)

Then, once you have your personal daily inventory in hand, you can compare "what you do" and "what you want to do". If you can close the gap between those two, you will find you have reinvented yourself and have moved much closer to the core of happiness that resides in all of us.

*I think I am the only one who really likes the dollar coins. I like them so much I will often buy a roll of them at the bank, just so I can have dollar coins.

**CoinStar fascinates me. If you think about it, it is an entirely successful business model built on one thing. We are basically to lazy to count and roll our own change.