Henry David Thoreau In my early twenties, I read a book called "The Three Boxes of Life." Overall, it's a fairly forgettable career counseling, find your niche in life type of book, save for one unique insight it impressed upon my mind.

The book describes how, in a conventional American life, there are three major classes of human activity; Education, Work, and Leisure. We cram these activities into three "boxes of life" in a chronological fashion, although there is, of course, some small bit of overlap.

From birth until the end of our formal education, we experience the box of Education. Then we spend most of our life stuffed into the box of Work. Finally, at retirement, we enjoy the box of Leisure.

The author then offers advice for integrating the three boxes in a different fashion, so that we may learn, work, and play throughout life.

It made great sense to me, though I managed to forget the advice for almost two decades.

I strive to be an opsimath. There seems to me to be much more to be learned in life than that which can be crammed into a few decades of learning, no matter how intense. Yet with the notable exceptions of some professionals that attend seminars and the like to stay abreast of new developments in their area, and computer geeks, that have long ago resigned themselves to the rapid obsolescence of their knowledge, and the need for continual learning, the overwhelming portion of the adults in our culture never crack a book after the day they toss their graduation caps into the air.

We work too hard. Years later, after I had returned to school, I read a study anthropologists had done of the lifestyles of extant hunter-gatherers. The study stated that in these primitive societies, people only needed to work a few hours a day to meet their simple needs.

Meanwhile, as we as a culture have become more prosperous, we have less and less leisure, and work longer hours. The invention and ready availability of cheap lighting was only the first innovation that helped to bring this about. Our material cultire is another. The increased number and variety of consumer goods we now possess, bought in large part on credit, provides a goad of debt to keep us working hours much longer than are healthy for us, at jobs we dislike.

We are overworked and overstressed for most of our lives, largely because we have been conditioned to lead complicated lives full of stuff that we don't need and can't afford without pledging ever-larger fractions of our lives to making money.

But, I think that's a whole 'nother subject.

At any rate, over the last five years I've gotten smart enough to arrange my affairs so that I can learn, work and play every day. I spend hours each day reading stuff that interests me, both on paper and on the net- history, science, current affairs, fiction, whatever. For me, it's hard to draw a line between that and play, but I play in other ways, too, - concerts. meals out, dancing, and the adult games that CG and I play with our friends. (Sex, my friends, is the best toy there ever was :-)

As, for work, I do a bunch of different things. Doing the same thing every day would make me crazy in short order, as does "working" more than an average of about twenty hours a week. The work I choose to do is also sometimes difficult for me to distinguish from play- working at Renfairs being the best example.

I work for myself, I don't have a boss, and my schedule is largely my own. But there are tradeoffs.

I don't have a huge home, a brand new car, the latest fashions hanging in my closet, scads of fine jewelry, so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. I used to make boocoo bucks, and I was never more unhappy and stressed out that when I had to worry about maintaining that income stream, and keeping that business alive, not so much for my financial sake, but that of all the employess that depended on it for their livelihood.

Now, my needs are much simpler, and my stress level is just about nil. When I do get an urge for some big material item, like a new computer or whatever, I'll go on a work binge for a few weeks, and then go buy it. I refuse to go into debt for a consumer good, to include automobiles. A mortgage on a house, is, of course, a different case, as it is largely an investment.

I don't miss being wealthy.

More troubling, actually, is the feeling that I am capable of so much more than I do, but I attribute that to lingering effects of the Puritan brainbinding we all experience growing up in the culture we do, the priciple that equates hard work with virtue, "doing our best," as exemplified in the Bible with the parable of the three stewards.

My family is also a source of some of this - though not quite so much as before. My father, a child of the Depression, in particular, took boodles of vicarious pleasure in having a son that had "made it."

I don't really know why I feel compelled to publish this; it must seem like gloating to many of you that are hemmed in by circumstances, and chained with golden handcuffs to a life you might wish to be free from. That is certainly not how I mean it.

I'm preaching to you.

I'd like to encourage anyone that stumbles across this entry to do everything that your circumstances allow, to get free, to get out of debt, to simplify as much as you can, to get out of whichever of those boxes you find yourself in, and to somehow manage to learn, work, and play each day exactly to the extent and proportion that makes you most content.

Life is just to short for it to be otherwise.