Thursday, July 26, 2012

An Adventurous Life

I think it was because of my father's love of adventure and the way he was raised and the fact the he and his first wife and his brother when he was 24 in 1939 he chartered a yacht from Canada and sailed from Vancouver to Seattle on down the coast to eventually Los Angeles and then Catalina Island 26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach was the last land they saw for 40 days until they reached the Tuomoto Archipeligo and Tahiti. So, as I was growing up I saw all this and the 5 foot 11 inch bow my Dad used to hunt flying fish with a line attached to bring them back to the sailboat or the various beautiful shells from that area he brought back or the color 16mm movies he took while there.

So, I grew up with this sense of adventure and that somehow I was a part of all this. But then, I got whooping cough at age 2 and then got childhood epilepsy at age 10 to 15 and all this starting with the whooping cough made me a relatively extreme risk taker because at least I knew when I was taking physical risks that I was still alive and not dead. When you deal with a serious life threatening illness for months or years (at least this was my reaction) I wanted to take physical risks to make sure I was still alive. So, all my life I went from jumping off of  roofs of houses starting about age 8 to about 15 and riding bicycles standing on the rear seat while riding down the road and stuff like that. But, this was mostly about saying to myself and the world, "I'm not dead. Look! I'm still alive and kicking!" This, because I was and am very intuitive and co-ordinated worked for me. But then, there are also other people that might fall down their stairs and really hurt themselves as well (also, I have also done that when I first started to wear reading glasses and didn't know yet at about 50 that you have to take reading glasses off when going down carpeted stairs with just socks on. So now, I 've learned to not wear socks and reading glasses while walking down carpeted stairs.

So then I planned my whole life around one woman I planned to marry. Well, that didn't work out and this taught me that plans don't work. It also taught me, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." This philosophy saved my life and completely changed the direction of my life ongoing. So, I learned to live intuitively because most plans didn't work out and this led me to becoming a business owner and entrepreneur. It also eventually led to traveling around the world to multiple interesting places, getting married three times, having three kids and standing by them no matter what so I'm still there in all their lives in a healthy way. So, an intuitive, intelligent adventurous life is possible.

When I first started out on this path at age 21 I was suicidal and by 25 I was definitely living a different life than I ever expected to live. So, this path though different than I ever expected led me to the present and I really love my life now. However, I think my 20s were really difficult to survive both physically and psychologically. But then, by the time I was in my 30s I was raising my son and remarried and raising my stepkids and was living a life long dream at that time. I think the adventure of a mt. Shasta Wilderness family experience of buying land at 4000 feet and building my own A-Frame was very healthy for me and so I found myself at 40 to still be looking 25 years of age because I had really been happy during my 30s. I can't say my 40s were very happy because of a really bad divorce and custody battle. But, I also remarried to someone I'm very happy with the last almost 20 years now. So, somehow, living without a plan worked for me much better than almost anyone I have met who totally planned out their lives for every year of their lives. I haven't always been ecstatically happy but all in all I have had a really amazing life. As long as you can survive the bad times in life you can often create a really wonderful and amazing life in total. And for everyone, the bad times at the time you often don't expect to survive. But, if you don't give up just around the corner might be a life you will really want to be there for. So, don't ever give up.

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