With our upcoming event at the Camden Library titled “Living Large With Less: The Upside of Downsizing,” Linda and I are planning to share about our experience of liquidating our stuff and leveraging the leasing lifestyle in order to live and move more freely. And we are discovering it is an ideal that many aspire to experience for themselves.
We presented this material earlier as an all-day course at the Senior College rather than a two-hour class and quickly realized that it is “more caught than taught.” As I share with attendees, it is as much about the “wow” factor as it is any “how-to” principle. What we endeavor to impart to others is a sense of potential that is available when one is willing to “think outside the box.”
Teaching involves the transmission of ideas, while training involves the transformation of identity, and that is what I hope readers here experience: a radical insight into what your life can become as you envision “living large with less.” As grandiose as that statement may sound it is truly what I desire to inspire through my writings.
On that note, I love this excerpt from “A Vision of the Good Life,” the introduction to Man’s Search for the Good Life by Scott Nearing of Harborside, Maine: “The man who has a vision of the good life and who decides to live it is an idealist. That is, he is forming a mental picture of the desired or the ideal and attempting to shape his conduct in terms of that mental image. He is striving to convert the desirable into the real.”
And I came across another useful quote from an article titled “Piano Lessons: Do Writers Need a Teacher or a Coach?” by Jim Sollisch in a recent issue of Poets & Writers: “The difference between teaching and coaching is the difference between thinking and doing. Teachers are in the concept business; coaches deal in the physical world. Theory versus practice.”
As the author continues, “Admittedly there is overlap. Coaches teach and teachers coach. And there are gray areas made grayer by semantics. But the older I get, the more I believe we too often teach when we should be coaching.” At times I am a teacher who writes and at others I am a writer who teaches. But nowadays I think of myself as a coach training others to also dare experience the ideal of their dreams.