Perspective

Everyone's perspective on life is colored by everything and everyone they are exposed to from birth. It is also colored by the race they are, the ethnicity they are and their family history. So, it is also governed by genetics and even colored by what your mother experienced while you are in the womb.

Understanding all this, you and I are going to have our own unique perspective on everything. But, it is important to realize that you and I don't have the only two perspectives on everything. My perspective is unique to my own life experience.

What is important to me about this is that all perspectives should be seen as equally valuable. There is no one perspective that is ultimately more valuable than any other, even though people often kill each other over this last point all over the world.

So, my viewpoint is based upon 63 years of experience mostly living in California but also through 8 years of college spread out from age 18 through my 40s. I majored in Computer Data Processing when I was 18 and worked a while as a computer operator and computer programmer, did tab wiring on accounting machines using the old punch cards around 1966 through the early 1970s.

Then I had my mother and her mother who were also intuitives like they trained me to be. Since my mother and grandmother were biologically completely Scottish, even though both were born in the U.S and my grandmother raised partly after age 12 in Scotland, they were also Christian Mystics and Celtic by nature. My father came from a more Kansas and more cowboy point of view from his father. However, his mother was from Texas from a wealthy family and so had been to a finishing school which is what women did so they could either work in the world or marry well around 1900 or so. This had an effect on my father of being a straight A student from junior high through High School and he won the highest marks in the state of Washington in any public school for mathematics and penmanship. My father's father was an electrical contractor and taught all three of his sons during the Great Depression to also be electricians. My father's older brother and also my father both eventually became Electrical Contractors as well. However, my father was always upset that his father didn't allow him to become an electrical engineer. My father never got over the resentment of his father sending both his sisters through college in the 1930s but not the three older brothers. It took me years into my 30s to really understand why my grandfather did this to my father and his two brothers. But it finally dawned on me that people with college degrees during the 1930s were hungry and penniless and homeless often. However, people who had a trade like Carpenters, Electricians, plumbers, painters etc. were almost always employed and had places to live, food, cars, wives etc. because people always needed their houses to be maintained and needed room additions for new babies and relatives moving in and the like. Factories needed repairs and modifications to their existing electrical systems and so my father, and his two brothers were never without work or money or cars and it allowed my father and his brother to get married and for his older brother to start his family. (I didn't come along until 1948 but my oldest cousin is still alive and is 9 years older than me that is the daughter of my Dad's oldest brother).

So all this contributed to my personal perspective as a writer and blogger. In addition to this my father was a vegetarian by choice since he was 18 in 1934. He studied about how unhealthy all the shots being given cattle were to fatten them up for slaughter that often made people sick and ill. He also read about hardening of the arteries and various other illnesses that people would get from being (meat and potatoes) men. And like me as I was 6, 9, 12 years and older I watched contractors start to die from heart attacks, strokes etc. starting about in their late 30s and early 40s. In fact, still today the average life expectancy for a building contractor is about 57 because of the wear and tear on one's body and if you are a meat and potatoes man only then you can't expect to live very long unless you have a very unique genetic pattern in your family.

So, because of all this I was raised to be a vegetarian like my father. He married my mother and they both were in a religion that was vegetarian not because of health reasons but because of religious reasons. But he then taught my mother about being a vegetarian for health reasons as well. I stayed a complete vegetarian until I was about 32. I was 32 in about 1980 which was a time like now when there was unemployment above 10 percent in most of the U.S. and it was sort of like this until 1984. During this time I got into being more of a survivalist in the sense that I believed that our economic system might collapse. So I did things like get a lot of food staples and bury it in 50 gallon drums on my land in case one could not buy food in stores anymore for one reason or another. However, I didn't realize then that the rest of the world NEEDED the U.S. to be stable for one reason or another and would loan us money to stabilize our country. Because in the late 1970s and early 1980s we were going bankrupt as a country like now. Only then it was from the overspending in the Viet Nam War and now it is because of the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan. So, money was loaned to the U.S. by other countries and so our economy stabilized. Then money was loaned to Mexico, Argentina and Brazil and other central and south american countries by our Savings and loans. When those loans all defaulted it caused many suicides here in the U.S. when people's savings were lost. And then there were no more Savings and Loans anymore. But what you need to understand is that there were almost as many Savings and Loans before this as there are banks now.

And so FDIC came to be stronger in Banks because then it only guaranteed 100,000 dollars in any bank for anyone. Whereas now that has grown to 250,000 in any bank and more if it is within a  portfolio of investments but then the government insurance is called something else. So, now the government insures people's money within banks and stocks and other investments against sudden loss by a bank or investment company collapse. However, the day to day value of any stock can be almost anywhere still.

So, anyway all these experiences of growing up a vegetarian, with an extremely intelligent father, a very common sensical and very intuitive mother and grandmother, and being raised in a Christian mystic religion mostly while growing up in Southern California after being born in Seattle, helped create me to be a very polite and gentlemanly person, very intuitive, very interested in nature and wilderness and wildness, and someone interested in becoming enlightened in every way so I could one day help others as many many others had helped me both in college and then in my travels in California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, India, Nepal, Thailand, Europe, Canada etc. all during my life.
I tend to be very ecumenical (including everyone and eveyrone's ideas and beliefs) at creating a synthesis for other people to benefit from of everything I have ever experienced. In this way more people will have a useful perspective that might help them survive better throughout their lives in every way. That is my intention in how I write. And so, enlightenment to me, is the enlightened way to approach everything in life. For example, college and learning can be like a hammer that you can build something with, or it can be a weapon of your own self destruction. All learning is like this. So it is important to take a moment and to think and feel and to experience life enough to make some sense of it before you make yourself crazy and die just because you don't have a wide enough perspective on things yet. Patience I have found to be one of the most important virtues if you want to live a long life. And especially in one's 20's unrealistic expectations that go with that time in life might be one of the hardest things to mentally and physically survive. I think that is why it is said for Americans "If you live to be 30 you can expect to be 90". However, that is only true if you can survive to be 30 in the first place. And it is my experience that surviving to 30 is quite a chore.