The 10 Year Plan

Sorry for the lack of posts lately.  I just started yoga teacher training, which has eaten up what little free time I used to have.  Anyway, I wrote this little ditty below for TT, so I figured I'd post it.  It's a little more heavy on the "me" talk than I'd like, but it is what I wrote today.

10 years from now, I intend to be awake. This goal makes a terrible topic for an essay about the future, because I can do everything I need to do achieve enlightenment today. I can meditate. I can practice yoga. I can live mindfully. I can be aware of my surroundings at this moment in time. The trick is to actually do these things, so the rest of this essay will describe the conditions that I believe will best provide the conditions to wake up.

10 years from now, I hope to have achieved financial independence. I define financial independence as some combination of accumulated resources that will allow me to live comfortably for the rest of my life and a job with tremendous flexibility in the hours it requires and the location where it can be performed. Ideally, I’d like to be a full-time professional writer, while teaching enough yoga to satisfy my passion for teaching but not so much as to distract from my own practice. I would like whatever work I do to be ethical and help as many people as possible achieve inner peace and their own definition of a good, full life. I also hope to have been and continue to be a good boyfriend/husband, son, brother, and friend. I don’t believe I have to change much to accomplish this goal.

But let’s explore this “writer” thing a bit more, shall we? Five years from now, I hope to receive regular income from writing. Even if I cannot be full-writer, given the writing I have already done, I believe it is realistic that I can get paid to write. I need to figure out how to do this, soon. The path that I have observed most writers who I admire and become professional is to maintain an active blog that they update frequently. I have such a blog that I relaunched in December and updated faithfully until teacher training started. The two immediate obstacles that I have to overcome is the lack of updates since teacher training has begun and my propensity to diversify my topics. On the former, teacher training, my regular practice, cooking, and talking with my girlfriend eats up most of my free time, but I do spend a fair amount of time each day playing video games, so time is not an excuse. On the latter, a blog focused on a single topic may be the best way to move towards financial relevance, but I think I want to resist that urge, at least for a little while longer. People are multifaceted. Their writing should be allowed to be as well. The topics on which I currently write—my yoga and meditation practices and my desire to try to live an ethical life and move towards enlightenment and waking—seem to be pretty in line with my goals of trying to earn a living ethically.

One year from now, I hope to have had writings published at major internet yoga and sports portals. Places like Elephant Journal and Mind Body Green publish work whose quality and content I am confident I can replicate. I have a reservoir of approximately 150 blog entries, many of which I could revise to make suitable for publication. The best way thing to do might be to look back and see which of my pieces have garnered a positive reaction and to make them fit the submission guidelines at EJ.