Being self-employed means that every day I don’t work, I don’t get paid.

When I think about taking a day off, I can’t help but ask myself whether what I’m contemplating doing instead, is worth the money I will lose by not going to work.

Would I pay that money to do what I’m contemplating if I had to buy tickets for it?

When I go on holiday the cost doubles because I have to include the money that I will lose by having those days off.

If I’m unwell, I don’t take that ‘just in case’ extra day off just to make sure I’m fully recovered. As soon as I can go back to work, that’s what I think I have to do.

Just recently however I was lucky enough to get paid more money for one of my services, which is great from a financial perspective.

However something I noticed I was starting to consider was that taking time off would now become even more expensive to do.

Getting paid extra would mean I would lose more money every day I don’t work.

When I was earning less, losing the money for a day off didn’t seem too bad. I could justify it.

Now it seemed questionable if some of the days I would normally have taken off could now be justified.

The sad thing is that some of those days I was calculating ‘the pleasure to cost ratio’ was the regular day’s I would take off to visit my family, which I know through experience, that I should never put a price on.

But there I was, doing just that.

I mentioned this observation of time becoming more expensive to a good friend over coffee.

And it was a good thing I did, because it’s very easy for all of us to get locked into a way of seeing things and then take action inside of those parameters.

Like an artist’s view finder that blocks out large areas of a scene to create a certain composition, we can do the same with how we perceive certain things.

What was pointed out, that I had forgotten to take into account, was all the days that I would now be getting paid more for, that would more than compensate for the price increase of those same days off.

What I was made to see in that moment was that I was actually better off.

Like so many things that seems obvious after they have been pointed out, I find it fascinating how we create reality depending on our view point, and how different our lives can be depending on how many clues we find prior to making choices.

We cannot ‘see’ every angle alone. (I still struggle at times to accept this fact, much to my detriment – As Hugh Grant said in about a boy ‘I am an Island, I’m fucking Ibiza!’)

The likely hood of me thinking as I do now, since my ‘over coffee counselling’ is unlikely without having talked it over and as a consequence I would be acting into a very narrow version of reality, potentially at a greater cost to me than just money.