Magnetism, the Philosophy of 2nd Hand and the War Chest you will Need
(Part Two)
Then he'd laugh. "That's how corporations get 'ya rookie, they make (you) keep buying stuff (they) get TV to say you need (and) then where's it at in few years? But we're not 'gonna be their prisoners rookie, We're umpires."
For Uncle Jam, freedom was umpiring baseball games seven months out of the year. And the way he stayed out of what he called the "system", the need to always be making more and more money, was to objectify every purchase he made in this way. I'm not suggesting that you be a minimalist but I do recommend that you begin to question how much the things that you work so hard for only serve to keep you trapped doing what you sometimes don't want to do; to keep you weighted down when you are trying to break free for, in this case, our ride.
Besides big purchases like a new car or furniture, it's also all the little things that keep adding up that keep you enslaved with no way out You might ask yourself, do I really need cable TV when I only watch one channel once a week if I'm lucky. Wouldn't your time be better spent reading and visualizing for our ride or for that matter actually training for it if even on a stationary bike? Or how about the newspaper or all those magazines that you never have time to read? Is that new shirt or blouse really necessary when you already have plenty of other options to choose from? How about food? Might it make more sense to make your lunches the night before instead of relying on the more expensive, less healthy kind found at your work? And if you are driving a car, every week or month that you don't use it is money in your TransAm bank (Hint: It could be the start of your Car-Free lifestyle to sell it to pay for our ride!
It is also here that by looking at each purchase from the perspective of how important it really is to reaching DC with us next summer, that you can begin to take off some of the pressure that your financial obligations place on you.
For many this will seem obvious. But when you are caught up trying to keep up with what everyone else is wearing or driving or living in, etc, it becomes increasingly difficult to see the trap you are only building for yourself. In such a way, in always chasing after the almighty dollar to gain more and more, you lose sight of your power to make your own dreams real. And then when life passes you by, filled with someday's and lacking in adventure, you can't help but feel like having been a victim to it. So, as you learn in the words ahead to do what it takes to financially prepare for our ride, you will also be learning how to spend more of your money and therefore your time on the kind of adventure you only thought others engaged in and not yourself.
Having been an accountant, having lived on the financial merry go round from which I saw no way off, I feel eternally grateful for the car wreck that made the next ten years of my life a hell filled with questioning the mess my life had become. In being forced off to the sidelines of life in such a way, I also got out of the grind of just trying to keep up. As such I was forced to stand back and look for the essence of what my needs were and not the actual form they took.
All of a sudden for me, shoes were really, as the saying goes, made for walking and not for impressing anyone.When I needed a tent for privacy and protection from the bugs and possible rain, for example, I was no longer concerned with where I bought it or what it looked like. It just needed to do its job. My bicycles became about comfortable transportation and not mantle pieces used for show and tell. The items I bought didn't have to have to be the newest, latest and greatest with a plastic bag wrapped around them any more. Nor did they have to be accompanied by department store music or fancy dressed sales clerks.
This new awareness was really driven home by the fact that my dollars barely made it from one day to the next. Because I could no longer afford most of those things everyone else was buying as shiny and new, I started looking at alternatives. All of a sudden, I didn't find myself beyond going to garage sales, flea markets or thrift stores and buying, God forbid, someone else's used shoes, clothing or any number of the many many other items I had before spent top dollar on. I also learned how to trade around for many of the things I needed.
As often as I could, I tried to seek out individual sellers and not stores or markets with fixed price tags no matter how cheap. This was so because I could use such exchanges to work on those people skills made clumsy by my brain injury. Here I also learned that to get the best quality for my money I had to sell myself. In doing so, I learned to make the transaction fun for everyone involved. Instead of dulling my mind by standing in line waiting for a sometimes rude sales clerk to wait on me, it forced me to go deep within for the best, most dynamic me possible. Buying in this way also became an exercise in merging with the sellers, learning about their needs and how I could serve them, instead of keeping myself separate from my them with money. This would also become an important skill as I interfaced with all of the innumerable people that would become a part of my TransAms.
To find individual sellers of those things I needed, I read the free newspaper classifieds (because I couldn't afford a quarter for the daily newspaper) and bulletin boards at laundromats and those markets that allowed such ads. I found everything from blenders and toasters to electric heaters, even the black jackets I could use for umpiring my baseball games in this way. I made it a game. It became fun.
During this time, I also learned the fine line between quality and inexpensive and devised a formula for knowing which items needed to be top grade and which items were better procured as second hand. There are, of course, certain items, such as the latest in electronic devices, that cannot be located as used. Here unless you need them for your livelihood, you would do well to consider the penalty of not being able to buy them the price you are paying for actualizing your dream of a completed TransAm. And yet despite the occasional such sacrifice, the vast majority of those things you buy can easily be found by accessing channels different from those you are presently accustomed to using.
For our ride, some of those things you need may require that you mark time to ultimately procure them, but if you also make this a game, even keep them on the shopping list you will have devised, this search can become a treasure hunt filled with magic. And if you love the process and all those who play the game with you, you will become very magnetic to all those things you need, especially for our ride.
As you endeavor to get yourself out of the automatic of just trying to keep up, it is here that a secret does lie. This may sound corny but there is a difference between trying to keep up out of fear and trying to keep up out of love. With the former you will never have enough time or money. And yet by seeing those you are trying to keep up with as your brothers and sisters all moving in unison toward the same goals, dreams and desires as you cheer one another on, you will be far more readily supplied with all that you need.
The Power of Love
I arrived at the above awareness after years of list making, time marking and garage sale shopping combined with much study about the consciousness of prosperity. In the end, it was turning up the love that opened the door to the greatest freedom from my financial pressures. And I don't mean the touchy feely kind, I mean looking at everyone around you and everything that happens to you from a loving perspective. Here you will want to challenge yourself to find the perfect and good in everything. I could go on and on here but as an experiment try for just one day to have only loving thoughts about all that is a part of your world. No exceptions. From what is said to what is done, "attack it with love" and watch the world around you shift.
You might even do well to study Chapter 6 in "How to Manifest your Destiny" by Dr. Wayne Dyer where he discusses this in far greater detail than what I can do justice to here.
If you can be honest with yourself in letting a true unconditional love increase your magnetism, more and more ways to get your needs met will come your way. If you can be open to it, for example, there will even be many situations where strangers (friends you've not yet met) will offer to loan you what our journey will require that you have.
All of this is so because on some level, we are all attuned to the frequency of love. When that love has a focus to it, it goes out into the universe like a laser beam to bring back the fruits of its desires. This is why as our ride gets closer and closer and the energy of our love grows louder and louder and more and more directed, it will become like a forest fire that few can ignore!
Learn Detachment
In accepting the perfection of all that does or doesn't occur, what the science of unconditional love teaches you far more than anything else that I have shown you is surrender. And in the grand irony of it all, just as you can't take any of it with you when you die, you must also learn to release the need for anything you want to acquire to the omniscient, all knowing force that suffuses you. As you give it up to this unseen force in such a way, you must also learn to detach to how what you need will be acquired, what it will look like when it does come, where you will locate it and for that matter how long it will remain in your possession.
So why bother with list making, time marking and the world of second hand? In addition to teaching you about the essence of your needs these processes also help you focus your attention as well as build up the energy of your desires so you can feel more secure about ultimately letting them go.
As all of us fine tune our seeing, in objectifying our lives as we move toward the goal of a perfect unconditional love, we also need to look at other ways to minimize our cash flow. In addition to shopping second hand and determining how much you really need any of the given items that make up your life in the ways I have shown you above, there are other ways to protect the war chest you will need to build for our ride. This is especially so if you have found yourself caught in the grind of just trying to keep up.
Don't create new bills
If you have begun to eliminate some of those things that you might not be getting full use of from your life as we suggested above but are using your new found surplus to add other of life's temptations to it, you are obviously not coming out ahead. Toward this end, I internalized this awareness with an affirmation that I saw day in and day out, more than several times a day:
And since both of my rides were exercises in streamlining my daily affairs in such a way, you may as well get used to such simplification right now. With regular practice it won't even feel like sacrifice to move forward like this because of all the freedom it will be buying for you. Instead, it will feel like a sacrifice to give up all the new time for new activity and adventure you soon find at your disposal.
Uncle Jam used to reinforce this notion with the words, "Best things in life free rookie." He would continue his staccato philosophy with, "Sunshine, Free. Oxygen, Free. Ground, Free. What better than wind blowing across face rookie? No charge. Free."
I used to think and think about what he was saying here because I knew he deserved an audience. Uncle Jam was a man who had literally dropped out of society and it's ways. Jam had once been a star athlete (he even turned down a pro baseball contract), a scholar and a man who had all the toys, including a '57 Chevy that had all the women swarming all over him. Disgusted with the price of such a lifestyle, he found a way in which he could thirst after his true passion, reading and he supported himself by being where he most wanted to be when he was not surrounded by books, newspapers and magazines. In the sunshine with healthy athletes playing the one game he loved the most. He umpired youth league, young adult and junior college baseball. He also called the shots with his own life by keeping it simple.
Here you might also do well to abide by the words of my early gym mentor, Angelo Uchi. He used to repeat them over and over again:
If you can make them a part of your life right now, they will go a long way toward getting you off of the financial flame thrower as well as far better prepare you for our ride. This is so because your tour with us will be a total exercise in moving the miles armed with little more than life's basics.
Don't use your credit card
In your minds eye, you might do well to see every purchase you make as one you will have to haul across the United States with us next summer. Because that is what you are doing when you place the payment for your purchases off to a later period of time. As dead weight it also means that more of your focus and time will go in to working to get what you will have bought paid for than in to training for and then doing our ride.
The solution? Run your credit card as a bank debit card where your purchases cannot exceed the amount you have in your checking account. And if you must buy anything on time, make sure it gets paid off at the end of every month. Here, of course, you will want not to make big purchases that cause you to feel squeezed every time a payment is due.
Build a War Chest
If you are not building a war chest (in our next chapter we will show you how to do so) for our ride, now is an important time to start. Before you start raising funds, you will need to figure out how much you will need for your daily road expenses. Contingent upon how austere you can conduct your road affairs or for that matter how creative you can be with free camping and the like, you can get by on as little as your daily budget of grocery store food or $12-15 a day. Throw in five hundred dollars for little emergencies such as bike parts and that hotel or camping spot that you have to break down and pay for and the amount you will need to shoot for on a 60 day coast-to-coast ride can range between $1220 and $1400. Where $2000 should get you to DC with the least amount of discomfort.
If you wanted to go all out and make yours a lightly loaded hotel tour of the US, you can expect to spend $50-125 between lodging and food on a daily basis. If you are gone for two months that figure can range between $3000 and $7500.
You will also need to tack on however much a plane or train trip to your stating point and from your destination will cost you. Let's assume a worst case average, assuming you shop around and buy your tickets well enough in advance, of $300.
So some number between $1520 and $7800 becomes the target amount you will need to save (or sell things) for to make your TransAm with us real where $2300 is the figure most will need to shoot for to go coast-to-coast in comfort and with transportation to the start and from the finish.
And don't feel so hugely intimidated by these numbers. There is a saying:
If you intend to be there next summer, the money will have a way of showing up. In our next chapter we will talk about how you can build a war chest for our ride.
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