A snail gets attacked and beaten up by two turtles. The police come. They ask the snail what happened. The snail says, “I don’t know — it all happened so fast!”
My grandsons gave me some cool origami for my birthday. They made what they made because I wowed them with snail jokes (I got a million of them), they love my cool watch, and I guess they always see me in collared shirts. Great gifts from two amazing boys.
Origami is folded paper, which got me thinking about folderol, which is different but sounds similar. Folderol is frippery, wish-wash, claptrap, and other unimportant stuff. Origami gifts from my grandsons are treasures — they are not piffle, twaddle, or gimcrackery. Still though, got me thinking.
So I re-evaluated my activities and made some changes. You should do this too from time to time.
Folderol and Frippery: Cabal Fang Training Involution #162
Cabal Fang Vital Grace #3 is Frugality — “to be efficient in the use of time, effort and resources.” Take today off from training and spend an hour evaluating your use of time and resources. What you can do to trim, slice or eliminate waste of all kinds and get more frugal? For some examples, here’s what I got rid of and or adjusted this week.
- Fearless Fridays. Made a pact with a friend of mine as follows: every Friday we email each other a report of what we’ve done to advance our projects for the current week and we ruthlessly evaluate one-another — no quarter taken or given.
- Adjusted training time. 15 minutes less time on fitness and 15 minutes more on technique. I’m training 80 minutes a day on average (including days off — 100 minutes if you don’t). Too much wear and tear on my body at this age.
- Focused training time. Freezing my Korean Karate training. Current forms twice a week to maintain existing foundation in basics only. No new forms or techniques. 99% focus on Cabal Fang and Frontier Rough & Tumble.
- Very little free stuff. Can’t hope to make any money teaching martial arts in my retirement if I keep making making YouTube videos that give away all my secrets. Only occasional tidbits and teasers going forward. More effort on interesting books and sale-able products.
- Efficiency in fundraising. One more giant load to the recycling center to benefit the Cabal Fang Temple, then I’m done. Takes hours to crush cans, organize, bag, and haul, and we only get $100/load. The county can have it going forward. Writing books and increasing donations is a better use of my time.
- Gave up shopping for a new vehicle. I not Miss America and heaven knows I’m not pretty enough to need a fancy car to wave from. My ugly truck runs fine. I can rent a car for a couple of trips a year and not take on a $500/month car payment.
Robert Mitchell Jr. 