Yolo!

Greetings, and by way of a rather morbid but ultimately foundational statement, I offer you an introduction.  Glad to be with you, I’m Mr. Freebird.

And… I’m really not one for the ‘Yolo’ bit.  The message is to live only for the moment, and the short-run priority. And let’s not lie to ourselves, we all kind of love that romantic, fatalistic sentiment.  But like a lot of things in this strange world, look from a slightly different angle, a little broader perspective (like you just went on a hike!) and a new framework….and we’re really just looking at a variation on a very valuable theme.

When we think about Yolo’ing, it’s about front-loading the experience – living for the now, doing today what you can’t tomorrow, and damn the results.  The ‘devil may care’ attitude about the future feels brave, which feels good.  But the bravery of it allows us to not really examine the feeling closely, and thinking deeply, like for real, about seizing the awesome freedom that Yolo gives you, but not taking a teenage view on the potential and impending results.

Freebirding (can I trademark that?) turns that core, simple Yolo idea around, inverts the pyramid and gives us the opportunity to live really well while running down the dream of all of our tomorrows laid out in front us with a lot of track to cover – like the feeling of riding a bike in the dark fast.  Yes yes, we could join Mr. Petty underground in the short term (do everything now!!!), but if we live well and take care of ourselves, as we tend to do, chances are we got a good number of days to enjoy.  And that’s the plan – to enjoy the days on our journey and to enjoy the days of Freebirding when we get there.  As Tom said, “I felt so good, like anything was possible.”

RIP Tom Petty

So straight up though, what exactly are we talking about here?  A few thoughts…..

1. You and I, are going to the great hereafter, and we only get one trip around the fishbowl. That is for certain.
2. And, anything within general reason IS possible. You’ve just got to have the freedom to pursue those things that you want to be possible.  With the way things run around our little ol’ nation of states, the job that pays for the house, the car and the recreational stuff gives you just enough to have a taste of freedom, and not enough to have the freedom to make anything possible.
3. However……we think there’s a bit of a secret door in the floor here. It’s the one that’s been covered up by the rug, that you never noticed was there.  Save a little (or a lot) more. Invest it wisely. Diversify your investments. Live differently.  Skip the McMansion. Embrace your 2002 Nissan.  Stop watching cable TV.  Think a little differently about consumerism and consumption.  Start wearing a grass skirt and hunting squirrels with a slingshot.  Woah, blacked out – where was I?  Right, right – back to the door in the floor.
4. If you could be done ‘working’, call your own shots, do pretty much anything you wanted to, in say, 10 years – would you want to? We want to – and a couple of years back, we realized it was possible if we went after it.  Not so much to escape what we do or the life we’ve built, but instead to embrace the upside down YOLO.  The YOLO where living only once doesn’t mean living only for the moment….but means living for the moment, and the next one, and the next one, and tomorrows full of moments and possibilities….like a train track laid out in front of you running beyond the horizon.  You’re the conductor, the train goes anywhere you want.  The track ends somewhere, but that certain ending is what makes the view along the way worthwhile and worth paying attention to.  That view is finite; your days are finite, but those days will be more than enough if you do it right.  That’s Freebirding….and that’s where we’re going.  Come along.