Category: metaphor

The Bill Always Comes Due

“It is an inevitability that we all must face and even when we try to push it out of our mind, that responsibility is there to provide lest we face any consequences that comes with not paying the bill.”

When we think about the moment of slight anxiety or stress involved with sitting in a restaurant, you’re satiated from a great meal of great food and drinks, maybe you’re surrounded by friends and family on a special night together, in all that joy and happiness, you still have that thought in the back of your mind, “the bill always comes due.”

There is no way of avoiding it and you’re going to have to pay it, one way or another. It is an inevitability that we all must face and even when we try to push it out of our mind, that responsibility is there to provide lest we face any consequences that comes with not paying the bill.

While you are under the expectations that any food, drinks, or other service at a restaurant always will come at a cost, we as consumers try to not think about that at all to be here and now in the present to enjoy what we have ordered with the company that we keep. It is a key characteristic of human nature that we often avoid thinking about the future even when we do at present is likely to carry its own kind of consequences. I use ‘the bill coming due’ as an anecdote for how what we choose to do, how we act, what we focus on and prioritize, will lead to what kind of bill we end up paying in the future.

Just like you would not want to pay a restaurant bill you cannot afford by understanding your budget and what you can afford to order off the menu of that particular reasonably priced restaurant, we should be aware of the fact that there are other ‘bills’ that can come due in the future that can cost us more than we bargained for if we are not careful about it. What we do in the present can help us manage our bills and how we handle our future by dealing with it in a responsible and mature manner now.

Let’s think about our health and how we manage it as there will be some kind of ‘bill’ handed down to us as we get older. It can be a clean ‘bill’ of health as your physician or doctor will tell you if everything goes well or it can instead be an array of expensive tests, surgeries, or procedures that lead to a hefty medical ‘bill’ that will cost us dearly beyond what we can afford, even if you have some form of insurance. How do we avoid this kind of ugly ‘bill’ of health? Well, I won’t dive into specifics as I am not a medical physician but how you eat, if you exercise, whether you stay active in your daily life, can help us pay off that ‘bill’ in advance or make it that much smaller to manage in the long run. There are common sense ways to manage the ’bill’ of health as it will come due at some point, and you have a measure of control over it in the present to make sure it does not bankrupt you or cost you with your health in the future.

In a similar way, one’s ‘wealth’ and how you manage it in the present can help you pay the various ‘bills’ that come due on a monthly, yearly, or longer basis. When you use part of your paycheck and weekly or monthly earnings to pay down outstanding debt or to save up for an emergency or to help yourself learn an employable skill, you are making sure that you will be able to pay for any bill that can come due because you have accrued your wealth and investments in a way where you will never be broke from these ‘bills’ coming due.

If you make other choices instead where you spend every dollar you make and beyond that, get into debt with various bill collectors including the credit cards and other loans you have taken out, the bills that come due will be beyond your accrued means, and you may be struggling for the rest of your life to get out from the ‘bills’ coming due that you have to pay or face serious financial consequences.

You do not want your health, wealth, or ability to earn a living to suffer because you cannot handle both present and future bills to come. You should make sure to think of the future to save, invest, and earn for a ‘rainy day’ fund that can overcome an unforeseen or unexpected bill coming due. Again, I am not making any specific financial recommendations to you as I am neither a financial planner or investor, but I do want to impart some common sense and wisdom in how to avoid future ‘bills’ by planning to save and invest for the future in some measurable way so the bills coming due will be paid for entirely without any stress or anxiety.

Lastly, it is unfortunate where we live in a society where it can cost exorbitant amounts to educate oneself for the workforce and for financial success, indebting ourselves in the process. I believe education is worth investing in if you are able to afford the bills to come due, but if you are in a cycle where you can’t get out of accrued bills or debt because you went for higher or professional education, please make sure that the investment that you make in the present will help pay off the debt in the future. The worst thing to do is invest in an education that does not end up paying for itself later and help with all the bills coming due to that investment.     

Make sure you focus on those employable skills or to be a subject matter expert or practitioner, in an important area that will pay off because you invested in your education in a useful area. I know of a lot of people who cannot get themselves out of a debt or pile of bills, even with their extra years of education, because what they learned what not useful for the job market, and now they are stuck with bills that will never be paid off.

I am not against the idea of paying for more education but please make sure it is aligned with your future career or business goals. If you are not sure of what you want to invest financially in an education, there are many free tools and videos that can help you understand better of what opportunities are out there. I think it’s important to think hard about what bills you want to take on for your education because it is no good to have a debt burden that will prevent you from future job or educational opportunities because you have bills coming due that you must sacrifice your ideal career or business for.

Whether it is health, wealth, or education, you will have to pay the bills that come due, even if they come at an unknown future date. Make sure you invest in each area within reason that you will be able to afford to do so without suffering later for bills or obligations that you took on that you found were beyond your capacity.

Do not sacrifice your future by what you do in the present. Make sure you practice good health habits, invest in your wealth accrual with whatever route that you find is best for your goals, and to reasonably access educational opportunities that can create excellent business or career opportunities that you will not have to sacrifice either your health or your wealth to achieve. Remember that the bill(s) always come due at the end, but that does not mean life should not be enjoyed or taken advantage of, but to do so in responsible manner, where your present is secured in each of these three areas, and as a result, your future is prosperous, healthy, and full of opportunities.

The Fruits of One’s Labor

“The song is called ‘Victory Dance’ by My Morning Jacket and whose lyrics directly address the earned happiness and contentedness after a day of struggle through a hard day’s work.”

One of my favorite song lyrics deals with the satisfaction of another day worked and to see the fruits of one’s labor enjoyed at the end of the day. The song is called ‘Victory Dance’ by My Morning Jacket and whose lyrics directly address the earned happiness and contentedness after a day of struggle through a hard day’s work.

“Hope to watch the victory dance after the days’ work is done
Hope to watch the victory dance in the evenings setting sun…
Hope to watch the victory dance over many lives to come…
Hope to watch the victory dance in the evenings setting sun.”

The ‘victory dance’ could be interpreted as a metaphor for a celebration or a relaxation or a general happiness that comes over you at the end of the working day. Regardless of the work involved, at the end of the day or the week or even the year, you can be able to look back with pride and satisfaction in your ability to ‘dance’ or enjoy the fruits of your labor in the evening or night or whenever your work is done.

The key lyric I can relate to is that the work may be done for the day, but it will continue for many ‘lives’ or ‘years’ to come. While the work you did today was hopefully meaningful or valuable, your progress will need to continue in the future so you can keep enjoying the ‘victory dance’ in whatever form you celebrate or take stock of what you were able to do.

Fruit takes time to grow and to be at its most ripe for eating and the same goes for our labor. While labor or work can be evaluated on a day-to-day basis, real progress in our labor whether it’s a business, a corporation, or a conglomerate, that kind of work can take years, decades, or even generations to build. You can enjoy a ‘victory dance’ for any kind of daily labor you can put in because of the progress made, but a key point as highlighted in this song by My Morning Jacket is that you really should try to enjoy the ‘victory dance’ for “many lives to come”, which I interpret as years to come or even over the generations from one family member to another.

Long-term progress requires ‘lives’ or ‘workers’ to build over the years or decades so it’s important to not celebrate too early or to ‘dance’ too early because the fruits of your labor should not be enjoyed too prematurely but rather when the moment is right or when the fruit is all ripe. Fruit, like one’s labor, takes time to enjoy so it’s best to be patient and work hard over time rather than to try to rush the process to enjoy ‘the fruits’ prematurely rather than when things have progressed to a finished point and even then, there is always room for further progress and improving in one’s work.

Another few of the lyrics from ‘Victory Dance’ that I really enjoy is the emphasis on trying out whatever labor may be best for you to thrive, or for which is done out of necessity to survive. It is key to adapt to the labor required of you or which is most available at the time since the ‘fruits’ will be just as enjoyable at the end of it. If you are committing yourself to ‘labor’, which inevitably involves struggle, either mentally or physically, the rewards or ‘fruits’ will likely be worth it because of that same ‘struggle’ involved.

“But you should work, for the self and the family
Should I hit the water or stay on dry land, even though I never swam?
Take machete into the brush, though at first there is no path
Taste the warpaint on my tongue as it’s drippin’ with my sweat
Place my gaze in the futures path, seein’ things that aint come yet.”

Your labor or work is not just for your own fruits as the lyrics state above. It’s also for your family or for the people who depend on your labor. They must share in the ‘fruits’ as well beyond your own needs and desires. Needing labor to survive and enjoy the fruits of life’s necessities such as food, water, shelter, clothing, etc. will sometimes force us to get out of our comfort zone as well. As the lyric above suggests, we often must test our limits to secure labor to have the ‘fruits’ in life. We may have to swim even when we have never swum before, but labor will require learning both new abilities and skills to be good at what we do.

You may have to learn those new skills to secure labor to do or to have work for the future. You should leave your comfort zone such as learning to swim, or to hike, or to hunt, or to lift heavy things or to use your mind to solve problems.

Whether it is a machete or a screwdriver or a keyboard, you are going to have to ‘clear a path’ with your labor even as the song says, nothing was there before. Creating something or making something out of nothing is a key part of being able to enjoy those fruits later by the work of sound mind or a good body.

Lastly, you may be physically challenged in your labor especially if there happens to be conflict as the song alleges. You may not know it, but you may be asked for labor of national importance or survival such as in times of peace but also in warfare, and you may have to provide service as part of your labor not for yourself but for community or for country as well. The final lyric in particular sums up why we labor for our fruits to begin with to plan for an uncertain or unknown future.

We may not have planned to do certain types of labor or work but regardless of if you’re an engineer, a blacksmith, or a doctor, you may be asked to do other types of work that you will have to both learn and then be proficient at. One must always be prepared to do other kinds of work to stay agile, be flexible, and plan for the unexpected such as a war or conflict that you did not see coming but you may be forced into fighting as the reluctant warrior in the song lyrics.

To secure the fruits now and for later as well will help to make sure that our collective labor will not have been for nothing. When your secure labor for yourself to do, you cannot work forever so it is important to think of the future and how to plan to have those ‘fruits’ not just for today, next year, but for the rest of your life too.

A Roll of The Dice

“There is always going to be a risk involved when rolling the dice or making the choice in life as there is when it comes to choosing one of two possible decision or even one of multiple decisions.”

When many of us think about versus chance, the English expression, “A roll of the dice” comes to mind. When you are faced with two or more choices and you must act, it’s like rolling the dice and hoping to get lucky in a table game at a casino. There is always going to be a risk involved when rolling the dice or making the choice in life as there is when it comes to choosing one of two possible decision or even one of multiple decisions.

Life involves a lot of non-linear choices to make and that inevitably involves taking chances on it. There’s no bigger example for me of taking a chance metaphorically than the rolling of a dice like at a craps table. Dice can have multiple choices on them or two choices only, one of which that it will land on, the other it will miss, but there is only one outcome without any alternative once the dice stops rolling.

Many of our day-to-day decisions involve choosing, taking that action, and going in one and only direction after the decision is made like the dice being rolled. While we would like to choose both options to see where they lead us, the chances of doing so are unrealistic and impossible. Like the dice that we roll, in life, we only can choose one of two or more possibilities. Dice can have more than two choices and while your standard dice has six sides to it, life usually has us choose between more than a few options as well with only one possible choice being the outcome to follow.

The metaphor of rolling the dice is apt when you consider that for the average person, choice overload leads to indecision or no decision at all. The most stressful part of a person’s day is not making the choice itself but rather when they are not given a choice or if they have too many choices to choose from. There is real fear and anxiety in people thinking they made the wrong decision and if they have multiple choices, the likelihood of feeling stress goes up because the choice is not simplified, and they must weigh different outcomes rather than just two or a few of them.

When the choices we have in front of us are two or four or six, we suffer less from ‘analysis paralysis’ or from indecision itself. While you can still second guess yourself later, if you are still able to think your decisions through and make an educated guess or choice, you won’t feel as stressed or anxious. I think that’s why the adage of ‘flipping a coin’ or ‘rolling the dice’ appeals to people because sometimes, the randomness and leaving it up to chance is better than putting actual effort into our decisions.

That’s partly why gambling is such an intrinsic part of most cultures in that you can still act by flipping the coin, rolling the dice, pulling the lever, but you don’t have any real choice to make because you’re leaving the choice up to someone else like an algorithm, a card dealer, or fate itself. People like autonomy over their decisions but they also enjoy leaving things out of their hands and letting ‘fate’ decide what happens next.

Of course, ‘fate’ usually has its outside influence on the choice that is made whether that’s the wind gust blowing the coin on a different side you expected, the casino letting the algorithm or computer decide who wins or who loses, or more generally, the environment around you that has an impact on the outcome. Fate itself is not without its own influence on the outcome so if you think that there is anything in this world that is truly impartial or just unbiased to the core, I tend to disagree and believe that whether it’s leaving things up to ‘chance’ or ‘fate’ itself, nothing is ever truly random in its consequence and that no outcome is without its own chance of interference.

You may have rolled the dice, pulled the lever, tossed the coin, picked a card from a deck, but there are other factors at play that keep ‘fate’ from being truly blind in its outcome. Even when leaving things up to ‘chance’, you still acted up until that point and the fact that you put yourself in that situation means the outcome itself afterwards even if you call it ‘fate’ was a consequence of your actions only but it is rather true instead that the immediate environment, the people around you, and a number of other external factors that had an influence on the ‘fate’ of that outcome.

Rolling dice, playing cards, and gambling give people a thrill because your action can lead to random winnings or losings but that’s basically the illusion of it all. Fate in life like a rolling of the dice may seem random but there are outside factors in place that may seem like it was ‘destiny’, ‘fate’ or ‘random luck’ but involved several actions, decisions, beliefs that led to the present moment.

Instead of trusting in ‘fate’ to guide us or for our choices to always be led to pure ‘chance’, we lose the power of our choices and the education of our decisions. We cannot always leave things to ‘chance’ and must look beyond picking randomly or choosing out of a hat to guide us in life. While I disagree with taking on too many choices or nitpicking every decision you make, you must always be thinking things through, educating yourself, and being willing to learn from your mistakes.

Choices inevitably cause consequences, both good and bad, and we cannot foresee where our choices may lead. However, if we leave too much up to ‘fate’ or ‘luck’ as we call it, then we will never really mature or grow as people. People should do their best to have autonomy over their decisions and to not take them lightly. Yes, it can be fun to roll a dice or flip a coin to make our choices, but life is too serious to be gambling on our choices like that. Rolling the dice may seem like an easy way to go through life like picking random numbers out of a hat but that’s not how the real-world works. When we evaluate our choices, think through decisions that have big consequences, and trust in our believes to guide us through the consequences of those decisions, we will be better off as individuals for having taken control of our lives rather than leave it all up to ‘chance.’