As a young man often my choices would look like this: A friend, (male or female) might say, "Hey. Let's go do this." And so it was often an easy choice if I actually had the money right then to do that. However, as one makes a lot of adventurous decisions like this, one starts to find out that often these short term (a day, a weekend to a month kind of choices) often lead to more permanent things like where you live, who your friends are, and eventually who you are married to or who you have kids with or both.
The last kind of choice that was a bigger one than I thought at the time was in regard to buying a home. In this particular case, my wife, her father and I had to agree on the same home. I personally found that this was not going to work for me because I actually wanted to live somewhere I would be happy, my wife was trying to please both her father and I, and eventually after 1 year of her father and I not agreeing, I finally said, "Look. Too many people are dying. Your father could be next. Why don't you and your father find a house the two of you can agree on. Maybe that is the best thing to do." So I just stopped looking for houses because it never was my favorite thing to do anyway. I'm kind of the person like I said above where if I see something and I have the money I buy it. And this might take a day or a month but never any longer. So I went my merry way and forgot about it.
By the way I had told my wife her mother was going to die in November 1998 after spending Thanksgiving with my wife's Step Dad and Mom. My wife got hysterical and starting hitting me so I stopped talking about it. However, I was right. By January 1999 she found out she had incurable lung cancer and was gone by April 1999. She came with her oxygen tank to look at the house my wife and her Dad had agreed upon. Before she died her mother gave her seal of approval for the house. That was 12 years ago about now.
At the time most of my life had been spent by flying by the seat of my pants through jobs, businesses that I owned and through my first and second marriage. But my wife and her family did everything completely differently than anyone I had spent a lot of time with. The result is that since my wife and my skill sets are opposite we can deal easily with almost any kind of situation. My previous wife and I were almost exactly alike so this led to a lot of gaps in dealing with life. So, I guess from experience I can see that having opposite skill sets can be a long term survival necessity if you actually want your lives to work together in all meaningful ways.
But, I guess the point I'm trying to make is "Be very careful of the short term decisions you make. The long term consequences might not be what you think." For me, living now for 12 years in a large 2500 square foot home in an affluent area with a hot tub connected to our redwood deck where we can look up at the stars because being so near the ocean and away from city lights is really great. But it is not at all what I saw myself doing the last 12 years. So, I guess the best thing about it is it was a great home for my wife and daughter and I enjoyed the hot tub and the affluence and the safety of it all. But there is another side for me of feeling completely disconnected from myself and who I used to be. And that person is the one that has much more meaning for me than who I have had to adapt to to live this very very different life than I would have ever chosen myself. Once again, "Truth is stranger than Fiction".
No comments:
Post a Comment