S01E19 Stop Drifting and Start Building

In this episode, we explore generational wealth beyond money, such as the habits, rituals, and atmosphere we pass down to others. Laura addresses a common problem: we rush through days focused on obligations, waiting for vacations to feel alive, while our days slip away feeling flat and disconnected. The solution? Deliberately add layers and rituals to daily life through small, repeated acts.

Transcript

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Hi everyone. Welcome back to a life and color. I have had a cold all week long and I've been so worried that my voice was not gonna recover, but thankfully, I think we're back and I'm so excited. Over the past couple of weeks we've been talking about generational wealth, but not from a financial point of view. From a lens of The kind of wealth that gets passed down, whether we intend to or not, and passed down to your children, but also your community and your book clubs and your spiritual groups and your work colleagues. I'm talking about the habits, the atmosphere, the ways of thinking, the ways of being, choosing deliberately to create depth or just drift through life. We all know that we want additional depth and meaning to our lives, right? When we think about laying on our deathbed, we all know. That we are spending too much time focused on work and obligations and not enough time focused on the things that actually matter to us. We all know that when we imagine ourselves on our deathbeds, we keep saying things like, when I look back at my life, if this is all that I did, if this job is the only thing that I ever accomplished, I'm gonna be really disappointed. Or if I don't take that vacation, or if I never accomplish X, y, z, I'm gonna be upset about it. We're all on the same page about this. We all understand that. What we don't know is how to get from where we are to where we want to be. We don't know what we need to do to change the things that would go from disappointment to satisfaction And then also what would help us build something that carries forward after we're gone. So that it's not as if we never existed. What's our legacy gonna be? What's the inheritance from our life? That's what we're talking about today. These are the actual practices and habits to put in place that will fill your life with meaning and depth. Even if you never change your job or you don't accomplish on paper the things that you think you wanna accomplish that would make you feel satisfied at the end of your life. these are ways to stop feeling like your days are slipping through your fingers and stop waiting for special occasions or vacations to feel alive. What a tragedy. We wait for just a few days out of the whole year to look forward to, to feel awake and alive, and to feel like ourselves. Why can't every day be like that? We have so few days in our life. We should be filling every day with our full selves, because here we are. I'm here. I'm sitting right here. And within me is all the parts of me. Within you is all the parts of you and every single Adam of you matters. But when you spend all of your time with your obligations and your responsibilities, you're only accessing a tiny portion of who you fully are. These practices are a way for you to stop thinking, I just need to get through this time, and it's a way to add anchors and rhythm and signals. Your body starts to recognize these things and your mind starts anticipating beauty on a daily basis. Instead of just sporadically your relationships, start having shared references and you don't just exist inside time, you inhabit it fully as your full self. So here's my thesis, you must actively build the kind of inner and outer life that you wanna live inside. Because if you don't build depth on purpose, you're just gonna default to efficiency. And efficiency alone cannot sustain a human life. If we want a deeper, more human world, we must first build deeper, more human days on purpose because what we repeat becomes culture, and culture becomes inheritance. Last week we talked about step one, which was orientation, and that's where you clearly define the forces that are shaping. And that is where you clearly define and understand what is shaping you before you try to change anything. so we have figured out where we're starting from and what it is that's shaping us and that we're responding to on a regular basis. And now it's time to talk about step two. And guys, this is the fun part in finances. Step two is. The hard part, That's where you have to create budgets and set spending limits and make sure that you're putting all of these painful financial habits in place so that you set yourself up for success and happiness in the future Here. Step two has nothing to do with budgeting or discipline or tightening your belt or any kind of limits. If step one was about seeing the forces that shape you, step two is about deciding what you want to shape. I. This is the part where you stop being managed by culture and start authoring it yourself. This is the marrow of life, you guys. This episode is for people who are building something, maybe that's building a home, building a partnership, a friendship circle, a team, a creative life, a community, a family. If you fall into any of those categories, this is for you. I wanna be enchanted by my life. I don't wanna rush through it. I don't wanna numb out. I don't wanna optimize everything until the color is sucked out and it turns gray. I wanna soak it in. There was a time early in adulthood and also early in parenting, when things started to feel disconnected. Kind of flat. Not necessarily bad, just not vivid. Devoid of color. The days were full. They required efficiency. I had a ton of responsibilities, but I didn't have rhythm yet. The days didn't have texture to them, and I found myself longing for slower, simpler days. I am suggesting that instead of just doom scrolling, that we stop and think, what can we build right now? Why am I feeling stressed and overwhelmed? And where can I put something in place that would help my body and my nervous system calm down and also create a memory that I can hold onto in the future? Reach for creation. Create something that comes from you next time something hard happens. You don't automatically escape into distraction. You do the thing that you created. You light the candle, you color the page, you take a walk, you get together with the people that make you feel calmer. Maybe you reach out, you write a letter to somebody that you know wants to hear from you, or that even just thinking about them makes you feel more grounded. You know how to build something that holds you, all of you. when I talk about situations where I felt disconnected and flat in early adulthood and when I had my first baby, in both of those situations, that loss of rhythm and that longing for depth created a problem for me that I really had to think about. It wasn't the pace. You can't change the pace of your life in most scenarios. The problem was a lack of layers. I was only focused on the behaviors, the motions that I had to go through, and I wasn't adding layers of tradition and depth and music and sound and ritual to our days, which was what made my childhood feel so magical. I had to be very deliberate about how I was gonna structure my time and start to create meaning and add layers to my life to make it feel the way I wanted it to feel. This can look like anything, you guys. I am not saying that it has to look exactly like what I did. It's whatever speaks to you. So for me, when I was in my early twenties, it was a little bit more open-ended. There was nothing structuring my days aside from my work schedule, so it was about having real deep and meaningful conversations with the people in my life that meant something to me. It was about listening to certain music, driving home from work that set the tone for the rest of my evening. So I wasn't just spinning on whatever conversation I had at work or task that I forgot to do that I said I would do or replaying some confrontation that I had that day that was gonna stress me out. I would put on, I remember, back then it was either Black Eyed Peas because that gave me lots of energy to get home and go into that. Or I had a, CD that was just instrumental, you know, chimes and music that was meant to calm, kind of like spa music that would calm me down so by the time I got home I was feeling better. And then my roommate and I both were very intentional about we would light a candle while we were cooking dinner, take our plates, sit on the couch and watch our favorite show and just laugh and relax. And create that ritual in the evening together that marked time from day to day. And then when I was trying to literally create my family culture for the first time after I had a baby, my husband and I very deliberate about what it is that we wanted the house to feel like in order to create a home for our children. one of the things that we did was create a very structured bedtime routine, both for the children and for us. So for the babies we would read a story, turn off the lights and then sing songs and snuggle. And then once we put the kids to bed and they were asleep then my husband and I would meet, we would have a glass of wine or a cup of tea, or frankly, we lived across the street from Dairy Queen. So we also would, many times while I was putting the baby to bed, he would pick up blizzards from Dairy Queen and we would enjoy our treat and watch a show together. Our favorite, whatever our favorite show at the moment was, and that was our time to sit together to talk. To do something that created shared experience and shared joy and signified to our bodies and our nervous systems, what time of day it was. We could process what was accomplished throughout the day, and it helped us calm down for sleep. And mark time from day to day. It was small things like that that we have created over time. We have really small rituals that we do as a family, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes because it's a certain day of the year, and these are things that create texture and rhythm and layers in our life. This could be something that you do within a friendship. Maybe you initiate a book club that you meet once a month, or every week or every two weeks, whatever works for everybody. Maybe you create seasonal dinners and you take turns hosting your friend group and you celebrate the seasons. Maybe you write letters to each other. In the mail, on paper with a pen, maybe even in cursive. This could be something you do in your community, hosting something or creating a tradition with your neighborhood, maybe planning a holiday party or a holiday playlist that you're gonna listen to a shared creative project that you could all do together. Choose things that are. Look and feel like you. For me, lighting a candle and listening to music and drinking tea feels like home. For you, it might be something out in the world, something with a ton of people around you and loud sounds or music. Maybe it is getting together with a group of friends and taking the same walk around the same area every October or November and calling it the Red Leaves Walk. Maybe you and your partner every New Year's, review the previous year and write three words for the next one to come. It literally can be anything you want. But do it in your own way and in a way that makes your life feel the way that you want it to feel. Let me tell you something subtle that happens when you do this. Your life starts to feel like you own it, not like you're controlling it or you are, moving the dials within the boundaries that you're given. You own it, and you stop drifting through your days and defaulting to the norms and the rules and the roles that you're given, and you start initiating your own flavor something inside of you wakes up. You're not waiting for culture to entertain you anymore. You're generating it. And that changes your posture in everything that you do As you move through the world, you walk differently, you speak differently, you care differently because you're not just responding to everything you're building. You are a source of culture and energy in your own life. What you build at home impacts how you move through work. What you build in your relationships impacts how you show up in the community, how you interact with everybody around you, what you build in your own inner life. It affects the tone of every room that you enter. Think about that. Let that sink in for a moment. Every single room that you enter is impacted by you. When you know how to create texture and depth, you stop consuming culture passively and you start generating it. a society full of people who generate culture instead of passively inheriting it is a very different society than what we see today. If you are raising children, here's what I really want you to think about. When children grow up inside these kinds of layers and texture and depth, they're inheriting more than just memories. They are inheriting a sense for how to make things their own, how to create something from nothing. How to create meaning from nothing. When the world feels chaotic, they won't necessarily just immediately reach for numbness like so many of us do. They can reach for creation cause they'll know what it feels like to make something their own. And when they know how to make something their own, they'll care about everything more. They'll care about the communities, they'll care about their work, they'll care about the country that they inhabit because ownership creates care. And care is what we need to create a different kind of a culture Why does this matter? Why does it matter if your nervous system feels softer or you feel held, or you feel like you have a little bit more ownership and agency in your own life? These changes show up everywhere. That's why when your nervous system is regulated, you don't overreact at work. You don't yell at someone in traffic. You don't escalate small things into big things, and you don't have to dominate the room to feel safe. When you feel agency and ownership, you're not waiting for someone else to fix the culture that you're inhabiting. You're not defaulting to complaining and venting. At the end of the day, you're building something, you're working towards something. You're thinking about possibility. When your life has texture. You don't resent your responsibilities so much, and you can hold stress without collapsing, and you can tolerate discomfort because you're sturdier. And maybe even most importantly, when you have rhythm and ritual and anchors in your life, you don't unravel when things get chaotic, and that looks like walking into a room and not shrinking and choosing your response instead of reacting automatically. That looks like having enough internal structure that you don't need to control everything externally. That's power. And when enough people build that kind of internal and external structure, the whole culture changes because regulated people don't create chaos. Grounded people don't spread panic. People who know how to create meaning don't need constant distraction. They don't live like passive consumers. They initiate, they build, they protect what matters, and that is how a different future gets made. You're built of something, you're not floating, untethered through time. When enough people become sturdier and warmer at the same time, the whole culture changes from the inside out. Texture, doesn't just make life prettier. It makes you more resilient no matter what comes. Depth doesn't just make life more beautiful, it makes you harder to flatten in every area of your life. Why is this generational wealth? I wanna zoom out way out for a minute, not just talking about children. I wanna talk about why this creates something worth handing down to anybody else around you who's gonna receive it. It might be your children, it might be your neighbors. It might be your fellow churchgoers or your colleagues at work, but everybody around you is influenced by you just as you are influenced by everybody around you. When people grow up inside deliberate layers, or they exist inside deliberate layers, they don't reach for numbness when things get hard. They reach for creation. They know what it feels like for something to be mine, when I know what mine feels like, I care more about everything. And so when things get hard, rather than reaching for something to numb those feelings, I can reach for something that will create. A shared experience or a layer that will make something feel more meaningful and stronger and make it feel like mine, and that means that I can create instead of consume. I want you to imagine something for me. Imagine that it is 20 years from now, 20 years in the future, and your child, or maybe your niece, or a student or a friend's child is standing in their own home. They're tired. The world feels loud. Work is demanding, and there is a lot of noise inside and out, and without really thinking about it, they put on a certain piece of music. not something that was suggested by an algorithm or something that's trending They put on a piece of music that means something to them. Maybe it marks a season or a threshold or just signals. Were home now. They light a candle before dinner. They tell a story the way that you used to. They gather people in a certain way or they initiate something instead of waiting to be invited. Maybe it means that they mark the first day of spring or they write a letter when something ends and they don't think of it as extraordinary. They think of it as normal. That's generational wealth, not because you gave them money, you gave them rhythm. You gave them atmosphere and memory and a template for how to live life awake. When the world feels chaotic, they won't immediately reach for numbness. They will reach for structure. When everything feels devoid of color, they won't collapse into the grayness. They'll know how to create their own color because they saw you do it. You practice it in front of them. You treated beauty and depth and tradition as things worth building, not luxuries occasionally or later. Now, imagine thousands of homes like that. Imagine neighborhoods where children grow up believing that marking time matters and gathering intentionally matters that play and music and meaning matter. Imagine workplaces filled with adults that grew up learning how to initiate instead of waiting for permission that people know how to tolerate discomfort without numbing or how to design atmosphere instead of just existing within it or consuming it. This is how culture shifts not from the top down, from the inside out. This is why step two is so important. It's not just. Self-improvement. We're not doing this for the sake of add a little beauty to your day. This is authorship and agency. This is inheritance. This is how you build something that will outlive you. I don't want this to be about regret. I know that some of you are listening to this and thinking, damn, I should have been doing this all along, or, I really regret that I didn't create this for myself sooner, or that I haven't done something for my children. I don't want any of you to feel that way. This is not about saying that you've done something wrong. Think about the possibility for the future. You have the capacity to structure your inner and outer life in a way that reflects your values. And your values, what's important to you? Your opinions matter because when you build depth at home or in your friendships or in your creative life, you are teaching everyone around you what's important. You're demonstrating that life is not just something to get through, it's something to inhabit. when you learn how to inhabit your life you care more deeply and so does everybody else. They protect more fiercely, they participate more responsibly. That is generational wealth. So here's what I want you to take with you this week. We're not doing a full overhaul. We are not reinventing anything. I want you to pick just one area where you can insert a layer Maybe that's a deliberate rhythm or repeated act of beauty, or one small structure that reflects something that you value. Light a candle. Name your, get together with your friends. Go on a walk, mark the season, pick a song. Do something that will shape you. Because what shapes you, shapes everyone around you. And this is how we build generational wealth, not just of money, but of atmosphere and memory and steadiness and culture. This is just the beginning. In the coming weeks, I'm gonna start sharing more about something that I have been creating behind the scenes called Applied Enchantment. It's a framework for doing exactly what we talked about today, not in theory, but actually in practice. How to deliberately layer your days so that your life feels inhabited instead of managed. If this episode resonated with you, if there is something inside of you that is thinking, yes, that's what I've been missing. You can head to a life in color.co and join us there. That's where I share updates and tools and next steps as all of this work unfolds. But for now, just begin with one layer, because what you repeat becomes culture, and culture becomes inheritance. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'll see you next week. Bye now.