Risk and Exploration

Is risk and Exploration a good thing or a bad thing? I think the best answer would be: "It is both."

Without risk and exploration we likely would still be hiding in caves from saber toothed tigers and dinosaurs or something like that. ONLY through risk and exploration did we humans get to where we are today.

So, though maybe thousands to millions of people around the world died directly or indirectly from the risks they took and the explorations they endeavored to take, millions more succeeded where there friends and ancestors died trying to find out a better life for themselves and indirectly for everyone else through what they learned along the way.

In my own family boldness was something I grew up with in my Dad's family from my grandfather on down. My cousin and I are much more mellow versions of this intensity because his father and my mother were very mellow people but my father and his sister were very intelligent and intense people.

The story of my grandfather's life and my father's life sounds like unbelievable in some ways. But, on the other hand not all my relatives survived their boldness or the risks they took.

I lived around my grandfather and my father enough to know the stories told about them were true just because of the way they were when I knew them. They both were never say die kind of people. My father told me that once on a construction job his father had to fight 13 men and won the fight. That's just the kind of determination he had to never give up. My father told me of going at age 18 to help work his Aunt Beulah's Gold mine in Arizona and having to shoot at claim jumpers who wouldn't back off. This was just who they were and the era they grew up in. My Grandad likely was born in the early 1880s and my Dad was born in 1916 and passed away in 1985.

Recently, I was told by my cousin and his wife that my Dad was Valedictorian of his Senior High School Class. Though this didn't surprise me knowing my father still I wondered at first why he never had told me this. I realize now it was because of my blunt trauma childhood epilepsy that I grew out of at age 15. The doctor told him I might die at age 12 if I was too stressed out. They didn't know much about Epilepsy in the 1950s and early 1960s.

So, likely he didn't tell me because he didn't want me competing with his grades as Valedictorian of his High School. Though my cousin, he sister's son went through USC and NYU law school on a scholarship so this intelligence ran in our families genes.

In order to survive childhood epilepsy I learned not to stress myself out with always trying to be an A student like I had in Grade School. In Junior high School my epilepsy was the worst and didn't go away until the end of 8th grade and 9th grade. By tenth grade when I started my 3 year High School I was finally free of it completely. But, the Post traumatic stress disorder of barely surviving something like that really doesn't ever go away. Mostly, if I'm not careful I get sort of claustrophic like if I'm in the hotel room I usually want the bed nearest the sliding glass door and veranda or something like that or in my room at night I want the shade to the sun roof open and my bedroom door open too. This comes from choking and passing out many times from seizures when I was asleep in a dream having a nightmare. Each time this happened I often almost died from shock from the experience. If I had been 35 to 50 likely I would have had heart failure from the terror of these experiences and died.

Partly because of these experiences often I didn't believe I was still alive after severe mental, emotional and spiritual trauma. So, often I would do things like jump 10 feet off of roofs to assure myself that I was still alive or ride my bike down the street standing on the seat and holding the handlebars, or sit on my seat and ride for miles without any hands on the handlebars. All these things I did and more to reassure myself that I wasn't dead from my experiences. This helped me focus and accept I was still alive and I could be happy rejoicing in this way that I was still alive.

This risk taking often also was psychic in nature. So, I would take physical risks but also supernatural risks to understand who I was and what God was doing to me. So, when my seizures stopped at age 15 they stopped specifically because I had invoked God to live in my body with me. Once I invited and Invoked God into my body he came and my seizures immediately stopped and never returned from age 15 on.

So, I would say the greatest risk I ever took was to invite God to live in my body with me. But then, I have had to live with this commitment sort of like a marriage to God the rest of my life. And it isn't as easy as you might think. Just like marriage there are a lot of unwritten rules that if you break you will likely die.

So there you have it. The greatest risk and the greatest benefit long term of my life was asking, praying and invoking God to live in my body with me. Once my seizures stopped literally anything became possible.

But, I must say, living with God in your body you need a lot of courage and heart or you will die from it.