Perspective By Dad and Douglas Adams

Is it really work/life balance or is it money/life balance? After all, work is a conduit to money for most people unless you're lucky enough to be in an endeavor that you find personally fulfilling (which I luckily do).

Easter is always a great time to reflect on such things. It is a spiritual time when life begins anew, and hope seems to be budding with each spring flower and Yankee win. Easter is also a great time to chat with my Pop about life and get his learned prespective from 83 years of quality experience.

Like many men, he spent most of his life in the endeavor of making money. However his, more than most, were endeavors that provided him great personal and professional fulfilment. His career provided for his family, and in his earlier career he provided for his soul as well. From all of that effort, time, and life experience one theme came shining through in our discussions this weekend; money is a fine way to be comfortable, but it will not make you happy. Happiness comes from health, family, home, and worthwhile pursuits.

I know, I know... it's a bit cliche. But it bears reminding, especially as we face a recovery that is moving at a glacial pace. But has this recession left us in a better mindspace about how much emphasis we will put towards money versus life?

This got me to thinking of one of my favorite books which I recently started to re-read. It's the five part trilogy of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, in which he kicks off the whole story like this:

" Orbiting at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-decended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This plant has a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Happy Spring, and please remember to take a whiff of the budding flowers and to just listen to ball game on the radio.

And subject to my last blog, Pop met Ripley and thinks he's going to be a great one.