Surviving Ones Life

Surviving Ones Life. There are times in life that seem impossible to deal with. In fact, I would say that every point in ones life has some of these impossible elements. However, I also have this theory that there tends to be an equal amount of good and bad stuff happening in ones life at one time. This may not be obvious to everyone because each person is attached to different things. For example, when one is in ones teens it appears to be more about relationships. However, in ones 20's and 30's it begins to be more about money. By ones 40's and 50's it is more about health and extended family. By the time ones 60's and beyond come it is about maintaining enough health and money to continue to live in a body on earth successfully. So the problem of having enough good things going on in ones life to stay alive is an ongoing one, it's just that the types of problems tend to change through time.

I have also noticed that kids who deal with more family problems growing up than most sometimes do quite well in their 20's. Whereas someone like myself that comes from a very good family suffers a lot psychologically at least in ones 20's. This, for me at least was about having very good parents and not having to worry about money that much while growing up. For me, the problems growing up were about health and being raised in a religion that so few people adhered to worldwide that I had to be careful even speaking about my religion until the late 1960's when everything on the West Coast changed dramatically. You can't imagine how weird it was in the 1950's to be raised a vegetarian even in Los Angeles. For example, what was I going to eat in any restaurant: Baked potatoes, mushroom soup, tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich? Because of this my family and I seldom went out to restaurants except for a few vegetarian restaurants at places like Self Realization Fellowship in Hollywood or Encinitas near San Diego. However, those places don't exist anymore. Now there are restaurants and vegetarian eateries even in every Whole Foods Grocery Store. And Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and many other cities like San Diego are dotted with vegetarian restaurants which wasn't the case when I grew up in the 1950's.

Though 1969 to 1971 I had to struggle to not self destruct, the most difficult times in my life began with my father's passing in 1985. With my father's passing I began to unravel. Though I had married and had a son by this time and had divorced and married again a lady with 2 kids already who was also divorced, when my father passed away I had no idea it was going to tear up my life like it did. This wasn't my Dad's fault. It was mine for not realizing how much a part of my life my Dad was. Also, the religion I was raised in had an unrealistic view of how people were going to ascend at the end of their lives like Jesus. To some of you this might sound ridiculous and to me now it does too. But at that time thinking that way was all I knew so when Dad got prostate cancer, then bone cancer and eventually died because he didn't believe in Doctors or trust them I realized how limited my father's view of reality really was. Even though I would call my Dad a spiritual John Wayne kind of figure in real life, there are real limitations to being that strong, that inflexible etc. I really had to grow a lot when my Dad passed on because my mother became like a ship without a rudder and moved about 8 or 9 times until she got senile dementia at age 82 and had to be institutionalized in an alzheimer's and senile dementia facility. So when my Dad passed on in a way I lost both my parents because my mother wouldn't listen to any of my common sense decisions to help her life. Instead she usually would act like she agreed with me and then eventually do the opposite. As a result it created many problems in her life and mine. I just think she couldn't imagine listening to any child she had raised all the way from being a baby. However, I had to realize I couldn't be my Dad for all the people who still needed him. Dad was definitive and scary and I was always more of a negotiator and a peacemaker in the family. Whereas Dad always had the last word but you always knew where you stood with him. What I miss the most about my father was that he would always tell me the truth whether it hurt me or not. There are so few people in life that don't just give platitudes. There are so few people who tell you the truth about anything. Whether I agreed with Dad or not I always knew he would be there for me to the death, and even after that if he could manage it.