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prep4tomoro · 2 years ago

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Minimalist Living - The Conserver Lifestyle: Freedom From Stuff

Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions." (Luke 12:15) Security doesn't come from having more but from needing less. "Because we lack a divine Center, our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity." ― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth "a man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had." ― John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress Job, Money, Status, Stuff . . . the American Dream? The American nightmare! The more I have, the more I want, the more things breakdown, the more stress to replace them and get more. How does it end? An unfullfilled life (and death) or with removing those "things" that satisfy so little. The older I get, the less I need, and the more I realize how my possessions have become more burdensome than comforting. The more I have, the more I have to lose. I am a slave to my stuff. The more money I make, the more stress I have and more fearful of losing what I have strived so hard to accumulate. "The one with the most toys wins" is a favorite saying for the one who seeks stuff to make them think they are happy. A movie called "LESS: Losing is Everything" helps to make the point that "when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change" and will gain a new-found sense of freedom. Needs vs. Wants: NEEDS are basic (not fancy) things we must have to survive like air, water, food, shelter and clothing. WANTS are luxuries; things I can live without like TV, car, jewelry; things we would like to have simply to enjoy. I ask myself the question "do I NEED this or do I WANT it?" Is it a necessity for my health or to perform a task, or is it something I want, just because? I have found that most of what I thought I needed, is simply something I wanted and could have done without and saved money, space and the aggrivation to get it. Later, I find those wants have lost the alure that sucked me in to buying them, and now I just want to get rid of the financial burden, or inconvenience, they cause. I encourage seeking simplicity. The more I have, the more I have to lose and greater will be the pain when it's gone. Things I Have Learned:

1 - Never say "never" - When we say “I could never…” we are limiting the possibilities for our lives. 2 - Start Working NOW to Get Out of Debt 3 - Don't envy those who have more. They, generally, have more to lose, more to maintain, less freedom and less financial discipline. 4 - Become keenly aware of income, spending and savings activities. This is best done with a Spending Plan/Budget. 5 - Establish and practice a strict NEEDS vs. WANTS mentality. Don't justify giving in to WANTS and Instant Gratification. 6 - Eliminate unnecessary (WANTS) monthly expenses. 7 - Find ways to reduce necessary (NEEDS) monthly expenses. 8 - Combine travel. If you need to go to the store, stop by the store on your way home from work. And shop at stores on route to/from home. 9 - Understand that "less expensive" does not necessarily mean "cheap". "Less expensive" soap will clean, and "less expensive" toilet paper will wipe, and go down the drain just as well as the "best" expensive brands (see The Dollar Store is My Friend). 10 - Turn off or unplug electical applicances and lights when not being actively used (see Kill Your Electrical Vampires). 11 - Addictions and Bad Habits sap, not only our finances, but our energy and health as well. Kick the habits. You can do it!

Consider a Disciplined Pursuit of Less: Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials. Not just once a year as part of a planning meeting, but constantly reducing, focusing, and simplifying. Not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but being willing to say NO to really terrific opportunities as well. Ask "What is essential?" and eliminate the rest. Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to eliminate the nonessentials. At once, we have the key to unlock the next level of our lives. Few appear to have the courage to live this principle, which may be why it differentiates successful people and organizations from the very successful ones. Too many of us trade our happiness and well-being for the reliability of a steady paycheck. We work long hours at jobs we dislike or find unfulfilling so that we can buy a lot of stuff that never really seems to satisfy us. And when that paycheck turns out to be not so reliable, we panic. Unemployment terrifies us. Is there any way out of this dilemma? Charles Long reveals one possibility -- the Conserver Lifestyle. . . . Security doesn't come from having more but from needing less. Resources: How to Survive Without a Salary by Charles Long Books on Frugal Living [Reference Link] Related Links: No-Nonsense Guide to Simplify Every Aspect of Your Life (Podcast) Is Simple Living for You? The Untapped Potential of Less Find That "One Thing"

[14-Point Emergency Preps Checklist] [11-Cs Basic Emergency Kit] [Learn to be More Self-Sufficient] [The Ultimate Preparation] [5six7 Menu]

#money #needs v wants #minimalist living #prepper #prepare4tomorrow #survival #shtf #debt #finances #instant gratification #declutter #downsizing #cut expenses #debt-Get Out #living with less

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spacedace · 1 year ago

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Reluctant War AU Part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Everything I know about Flash and the FlashFam (& Flash enemies) comes from fandom and theflashmuseum on tiktok so fair warning on that lol

Sorry if Barry is out of character or things don't line up with canon. Canon is a stranger I think I passed in a crowded room once, I did not ask for its number lol

Anyway, time to touch a bit more on that whole Ancient of the Speedforce Elle thing yeah? Here be a sprinkle more of that and I promise there's more to come haha

Gonna start posting this on Ao3 soon, probably Monday or Tuesday, so heads up I may stop adding these parts here on tumblr once I do

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It lived beneath his skin.

For a long time Barry had never believed in magic. His world was grounded, scientific, made of predictable rules and laws. Tools that could be used to explain everything strange or supernatural away as just another odd twist of the massive universe they all belonged to.

It took perhaps a little longer than it should have to admit that magic was as real as thermodynamics and gravity and atoms. That the world was a great deal stranger than even science - for all its own wildness at times - could account for. There were things that went bump in the night. Hells below and heavens above and things that crawled and clawed their way out from the places in between.

It was almost a little embarrassing how long it had taken him to admit to such things, when considering his relationship with the Speedforce.

A force of the universe. Like gravity or time, pushing and pulling everything along. Something that could be explained with all the familiar scientific concepts that had buoyed him along in life for so long.

Except.

Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful but felt. Making his hair stand on end, his fingers tingle and numb. Sliding against his veins, bouncing between scar tissue and freckles. Pressing out from the confines of his sternum, rattling against his rib cage as it shifted and moved. Twining around each and every vertebrae. Coiling over and under itself within his skull, darting along the paths of his neurons and nerves. It hummed in every cell in his body. Darted and danced in the space between the atoms that made up his very existence.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

Lived.

Not existed. Not contained. Lived.

He couched it in terms of science, but science - despite his long time refusal to acknowledge it - wasn’t really able to explain the full scope of what he could feel. Not just the power of the Speedforce, but the…the identity of it. The living part that made it’s home in his body, existing in a way that was separate from him. Distant and indistinct most of the time, but…sentient.

He could feel it. Warm and excitable, delighting every time he tapped into it. Pushing him from behind urging him on and on, tugging him forward from ahead beckoning to go, faster, faster. Joyful in his victories, despairing in his loses.

It lived beneath his skin.

Until it didn’t.

He followed its joyful calls, pushed beyond what he should, what he knew was safe. Chasing that welcoming chant of faster, faster until he was there. In the Speedforce. More even, was the Speedforce.

He was everywhere. Beyond everywhere. In every possible everywhere it was possible to be. Every world, every universe, every multiverse.

To enter the Speedforce, to merge with it, was to become part of existence itself.

He couldn’t remember everything about it once he came back. He got flashes, sometimes, quick moments in dreams of places, of moments. What stuck with him most had been the feeling of it all. That had been the hardest part of returning. The sense of terrible loss, of having been surrounded by such a giddy, delighted, devoted love only to be pulled back from the heart of it. Returned to how he had been before, drifting at the edge of it all, it had been painful, agonizing even.

He…adapted, eventually. The sense of it all was still there, just distant. Something he’d come to feel he’d see again, someday.

It had been different, recently.

His powers were the same, he just as fast as ever, but…there was something…off. Changed. A sense that while his speed remained, the Speedforce had become, for lack of a better word, quiet. Distant.

He’d been having dreams, since it started. Not the quick glimpses of his time where he’d merged with the Speedforce. No, instead they were more nightmarish. Not nightmares exactly, though he felt like they should be with what they contained, but something else. Something that felt unnervingly real, left him confused and reeling when he woke with the certainty that when he opened his eyes he’d see the same as what his dreams held.

In the dream, he was in a room.

Cement and metal, hostile and brutalistic in design. He was bound in place, standing upright with feet and hands spread wide and locked in place within strange devices. Gleaming chrome and brilliant green, a painful thrum of energy surging through his body - not the Speedforce, something else, deeply unpleasant pulsing through every cell of his being and freezing him in place more firmly then the restraints did. Projectors hung from the ceiling, displaying images of landscapes, changing every ten second or so.

The sight of them made him nauseous, body shivering and spasming with the burning, agonizing need to go, but at the same time there was something distantly soothed by them too. Like a gnawing hunger abated with water and crumbs. The need for food not gone but the pangs diminished by the false feeling of being full.

In the dream he felt like he was dying.

In the dream he was afraid that maybe he couldn’t.

That he’d be trapped alive in that state forever, watching places he’d never see in person again as he was trapped in one place. His mind spiraling his Core splintering under the weight of it all, scared so scared. He wanted his brother, wanted to see the cement walls explode into dust and debris and see him there, ready to save the day like he had so many times before.

He just had to wait. His brother was looking for him, would have everyone in the Realms looking for him. He just had to hold on.

Barry didn’t have a brother. He only remembered when he woke, heart hammering in his chest fast even by his own standards, mouth tasting of bile and body aching with the need to go.

He hadn’t been sleeping much these days, even before the King of the Dead declared war.

It was having its effects, as sleep deprivation always did. His mind drifting, catching again and again on the dream, attention far away from the world around him. How many times had he been startled by someone calling his name, touching his arm? How many times had they given him a pinched, worried look that told him they’d been trying to reach him for longer than they should have before he noticed.

He was aware, distantly, of the glowering, stern faces around him. The flinty looks of his friends’ and partners’ eyes as they stared at the image of Waller’s scowling mug.

She’d declined an in-person meeting, hunkering down in some bunker somewhere trying to avoid the consequences of her latest atrocities. Or maybe just trying to avoid the very real possibility that one of the members of JL Dark might try to kill her for what she’s caused.

Or JL light, for that matter.

Bruce and Clark had their rules that they lived by, but Diana certainly wouldn’t hesitate to splatter Waller’s brains across the nearest available wall. In reviewing footage of one of the last battles - she’d been at the other one at the time, trying to contend with a ghost in the shape of an ethereal dragon - she’d recognized the spectral figures of Amazons long dead, fierce even in death as they fought with a warrior’s pride along side the rest of Phantom’s armies. They followed a figure that towered even above the Amazons, four arms and gleaming armor and a name that Barry associated with ruin and forgotten hope but who was so much more to Diana. Heroes long departed to the fields of Elysium, stepping out of their well earned rest to fight once more.

A few hadn’t survived the weapons the GIW shot them with. Barry didn’t know what that meant, for a ghost to die. If they simply returned to their afterlife or -

He tried not to think about the or.

They’d been going back and forth for awhile now. Voices faraway, muffled. The world felt as if it was underwater, blurred and cold. Clark had gotten to his feet at some point, Waller’s grip on a pen so tight on the screen he expected to see if burst at any moment. It was an important meeting, an important discussion. One he needed to be apart of, aware of, but it all escaped him. Sand held too tightly, slipping through his fingers. On the screen, Waller hit a button on the computer beside her and the image changed.

The world burned back to life in sharp relief.

The dream.

The room.

Cold cement. Projections of unreachable places on the walls. Chrome and green machinery in a configuration meant to contain.

It looked larger on the screen.

Maybe it was how small the figure held prisoner inside it was.

She was young. A child, no older than Superboy Jr. or Robin. She looked like Phantom - her father - but there were differences. Her hair was white, but it didn’t look like the spun starlight of her father’s. Instead it burned, the bright hot crackling of the plasma of a lighting bolt striking. Skin the blur of shapes caught just at the corner of the eye as you ran past, Eyes -

Looking at him.

The image had come up, a live feed - he knew it was live, knew he was looking at her where she was at that exact moment - and she’d been as he was every time he tried to sleep. Trembling and shuttering, eyes squinting against the pain, trying to stay open so as not to miss a single moment of the flat images imposed on blank cement walls. Desperate to fill the fathomless hunger burning deep down in the Core of her.

But then a shuttering breath and her eyes - the burning green of an afterimage - snapped up to the camera. Snapped up to look at him, recognition in her young face. And despite never having seen this girl before, he recognized her too.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

She lived beneath his skin.

He could feel her there. Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful, but felt.

Not as felt as she used to be.

The image snapped back to Waller’s face, smug and self-satisfied. Talking - lying - about the how the girl was there, what the GIW’s intentions for her were. Barry was on his feet, but so was everyone else. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, could only hear static, the rush of wind, the crack of the lightning bolt. A call for help.

It was then that the alarms began to blare. On the screen someone rushed in to whisper into Waller’s ear. Bruce was running out of the room towards the Zeta tubes and Barry was right there with him and there was so much chaos around them, men in white and Gothamites and Ghosts banding together to rain terror down upon them and something massive and horrible and living towering above it all and Barry let go of that last bits of logic and thought.

Instinct, older than he was. The echo of a voice that had called him for years now, carrying him along, biding him forward:

Run.

Someone might have shouted after him as he left Gotham behind. He didn’t know.

All he knew was the pounding of his feet upon the ground, the wind in his face, the Speedforce lashing and frantic and hopeful burning and sizzling beneath his skin. Calling him further and further away until he stood in a vast, empty field staring at a single, rusted shack near ready to collapse before him.

He wasn’t alone.

Wally. Bart. Max. More still. Not just his family and friends. Eobard. Hunter. Thaddeus. Everyone touched by the Speedforce.

They didn’t speak. Bodies humming and thrumming, crackling with energy and intent.

Minds as one, they focused on the shed, the hidden hatch inside, the base hidden deep below.

The Speedforce lived beneath their skin, and no one was going to steal it away from them.