Colorado Springs Wildfire: Inventorying What You Love

Colorado Springs Wildfire: Three miles from my house

Colorado Springs Wildfire 2013

There is a wildfire burning three miles from my house right now.

I took this picture yesterday at around 1 pm.  This area of our city is called Black Forest.  There are hundreds of gigantic homes on two to five acre lots.  We have friends who live in these neighborhoods and all of them are evacuated and waiting to hear if their homes are still standing.

My family and I are on voluntary evacuation as we directly border the mandatory evacuation area.

We went room to room with our iPhone capturing video of our belongings in case we need to provide proof to our insurance company.

I think our home should be fine.  Last year the Waldo Canyon Fire jumped the ridge and traveled three miles in under an hour.

So we are not entirely out of the woods just yet.  More coverage on the Black Forest Fire.

Four hours after the fire began

Inventorying what you love

It is very telling when each person in your family has to go through their personal belongings and determine what they can’t live without.

We have gone through this drill two summers in a row.

The list ends up being much smaller than you would think.

Since we have three cars now with a teenage driver, we could afford to be more liberal in our limits.

Before I tell you what did make the cut, I’ll let you in on what didn’t.

Everything that can be purchased in a store was shrugged off as not imperative.  TV’s, Computers, furniture, clothes, kitchen appliances, all of those things scored low on the lover meter.

In some ways these things even feel heavy.  We’ve heard it a hundred times that the stuff we own weighs us down.  When inventorying our home, 95% was stuff we could live without.

To give you the full story, we lost our twelve-year-old daughter two and half years ago.  Hadley Rae McHugh’s life changed us forever including what we know we can’t live without.

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What did we bring with us?

We each packed a suitcase of clothes, my laptop, precious keep sakes, a couple of comforts like pillows and stuffed animals.

My son is the biggest minimalist, so his suitcase was filled with his favorite DVD’s, a few clothes and Hadley’s oxygen tube that was removed from her before she passed.

My daughter is the pack rat so she grabbed as much as we would allow including 74 lip-glosses and eye masks.

My wife loves here Lulu Lemon wear, wedding album, photos and a few of my daughter Hadley’s things.
In some ways she would like a new beginning.

I grabbed a stack of cards and letters that my family has given me over the years.  I pulled the family hard drive, my two bibles, a couple of journals and a bunch of gear.  The gear can be replaced but my thinking was “I don’t want to wait two months for an insurance check and not be able to fish, ride, climb, hike, swim.”

Defining wealth by what really matters

It turns out that wealth in our family is defined more by who we are with (each other), a few memories that we want to retain and a few comforts if we were living on friend’s couches for a bit.

Our actions reveal what we believe.  I am proud to say that our family defines wealth largely by the things that cannot be purchased.  Wealth is a feeling and a belief more than a balance of our checkbook.  Some of the wealthiest (financial) people I know are displaced from their homes struggling with the same question.

“What makes me wealthy?”

I wonder how these exercises of inventorying our things will influence how we live our future?

Redefining Success: #1 Never Gain Elite Status on any Airline

Redefining Success

Airline’s love to woo us with the allure of elite membership status.   They promise shorter lines, a six-foot stretch of red carpet we can walk over and the hope of free upgrades to roomier seats.

Here is what I learned the hard way

The only people who achieve Premier, Executive or Admiral status end up living a life similar to George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham in the movie Up in the Air.

Ryan spends less than two weeks in his own Omaha, Nebraska bed each year.  The movie profiles his almost tunnel vision pursuit of reaching the ten million mile mark with his airline of allegiance.

The tragedy of his story is that his quest for elite membership unfolds as a lonely reality of solitude and isolation.

After almost ten years of business travel, I’ve learned that if you have crossed the airline’s elite membership ticker tape then you’ve just lost at least 50 days of your real life each year.

Doesn’t having a wallet full of elite airline membership cards seems like an attempted payoff?  Shorter lines and red carpet walks are a poor trade for the days and nights spent away from my real life.

I revolt instead

What if we redefined success as never gaining elite status on any airline?  What if instead, we found a way to structure our life in such a way that stopped short of that reward?

Could we instead travel one fewer trip each month?  What if success was defined by not being rewarded for being away from home?

How close to the line can we walk? 

I shuffle my air travel between two to three carriers and successfully achieve no elite rewards.  Yes, I enroll in each of their reward programs but I attempt to never achieve the Premier, Elite, or Aviator, statuses.

My story

I travel a fair amount for my day job and end up spending 40 to 60 nights away from home each year.  Just even typing it I feel the conflict inside.  I love my family and love my friendships that await my return each trip I spend away.

For some business travel can be a nice deviation from their real life.

For me, real life beats any business trip.  I work for an international software company.  I travel because it is a necessary requirement to meet our current and future customers in the comfort of their conference rooms and offices.

Face-to-face meetings enable for a human connection to occur.  I utilize web conferencing technology like GoToMeeting or Webex regularly, but I also know when you simply have to be there in person.

I view it as a trade

I trade days and nights away from my family for compensation that enables for care of my family.  Some weeks I’m not so sure it is a good trade.  Using the principle of Dollar Cost Averaging for Life I settle in for the trend over time.

As you read this you see the precariousness of my goal.

I travel a lot but I value being at home.  I value caring well for my family and I am away from home a week or more each month.

The world will always tell us what constitutes success, but most of the world doesn’t live a life I want.

Redefining success empowers us to pursue our own target versus accidently achieving one that leaves us like our friend George Clooney.

How about you?