Writing

Writing (in whatever language you choose to) is mostly about practice more than any single thing.
I personally, realized I could write stories by age 9 because my grade school teacher started sharing what I wrote in front of the class. I was shy then and so turned red in embarrassment. However, I also felt (recognized) as a story teller like my father and grandfather always were verbally. Telling stories around the fire (before radio and TV) was a socialization mechanism which kept ones family informed and well and less afraid of the dark and of things that went bump in the night in families always before radio and TV. So, you had a lot of time (whenever you weren't working at something)
to share information with each other. How this information was shared often meant the difference as to whether the people in your family survived or not. Information and how it has been presented often was the difference between life and death and of whether your family had enough to eat or not.

So, writing (to me) is simply a way of communicating useful things with people. So, for me, since I view everyone on earth as my family now because of studies and spiritual practices, sharing useful things allows the whole human race to survive better and to prosper as a family group on earth and out into space in new places that we will colonize, now and in the future.

So, by example, I am trying to demonstrate to more people how we all can survive in better ways, in happier ways and in more efficient ways. How we share information is equally important as to what is shared and in what context it arrives. All our futures depend upon how information is shared possibly even more than what is shared.

For example, efficiency is about "How can I accomplish the most in the least amount of time." In my own life for example, since I come from a Swiss heritage that I can trace back to 1580 in a little town near Zurich, Switzerland, is about this. Always in my family (even though we came to the U.S. around 1725) it was about efficiency. If we weren't efficient in everything we did we might be criticized by parents. But then there was the other side of it which is the fun of trying to build or make something in the most efficient way possible. Since my father's family were all very efficient intense people, often other people might have been afraid of the intensity and efficiency of my father's family. This was both good and bad. On the one hand people just tended to get out of the way and let us be efficient. On the other hand efficiency also sets people apart on a whole different level.

Some of the funnier stories my father told me about growing up (He was born in 1916) was of his brother Bob. Bob was 4 years older than Dad and always built amazing things from childhood. Since they usually lived out in the country on 2 acres or more growing up there was always a radio (because grandad (my Dad's Father)was an Electrical Contractor) and always into the very latest technology just like all his grandkids and great grandkids are today. Anyway, Bob always built the biggest of everything. He built stilts so big you could fall over the top of a house with them. He built a slingshot so big that if it actually hit a bird it would cut the bird in two. Then when my father and he started buying cars and fixing them up one time Bob put the steering gear in wrong so when you turned left the car went right and vice versa. But he had a high school party to go to so decided to drive there anyway but put the car in the ditch halfway there. Also, Bob's Dad taught him how to blow up stumps with dynamite so he earned money on weekends blowing up tree stumps for farmers around 1930.

Then when Dad and his older and younger brothers became 18 their father wouldn't let them go to college but put both his daughters through college so they could meet good husbands. My father complained about this because he was valedictorian of his high school class.

However, when I actually began to think about this a few years ago I realized just how wise their father really was. In difficult times like the Great Depression and the Great Recession we are now coming out of, having a bachelor's degree, Master's degree or even a PHd doesn't mean you won't be homeless. But, if you have a trade like being an electrician or plumber, or carpenter might mean that you can always find work fixing something or remodeling something or maintaining something even if all the people with degrees or advanced degrees are homeless. So, I finally could see that my grandfather was making sure his boys had cars and money in their pockets always (and they did) throughout the Great Depression and even through World War II. So, in this way my grandfather was an extremely efficient man even though my father (emotionally at least) was offended by not being allowed to go to college when he was 18. So, he kept his three boys employed through his business (whenever they wanted to work for him) when they weren't doing other things like driving dump trucks building the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River or something like that. My father the summer he was 18 went to Arizona to work with his Aunt's Gold mine with an old Cowboy miner she had hired to run the mine in the Gila Bend area of Arizona. After growing up in Seattle since he was about 10 or 12 he was so grateful to be somewhere with wide open expanses and almost no rain ever. He really developed a love for the deserts and wide open spaces from this and retired eventually in Yucca Valley, California on the High Desert there on 2 1/2 acres in 1980.

In my own life efficiency was about staying alive and adventure. So, I guess a good title for my life might be "Staying Alive While Having Adventures". I was naturally efficient like other members of my father's family but I started out in life by getting whooping cough at age 2. This changed my life a lot at the time because I almost died of it. My parents were more in a Christian Science type of thinking where Doctors mostly weren't consulted unless you had a broken arm or leg or needed stitches or something like that. So, the first shot I ever had in my whole life was a tetanus shot at age 15 because a dog bit me when I was working for my father as an electrician's helper at someone's house.

The next problem I dealt with was blunt trauma childhood epilepsy(which means you have seizures from a blow to the head as a child). The seizures did not affect me during the daytime physically only at night about once every 6 months or so. But, the terror of this experience when it happened was sort of like being murdered each time traumatically by someone either strangling you or stabbing you in the chest. And then an hour or two later after you come out of traumatic shaking and being in pretty serious shock you are sort of back to normal but still sort of scared.

Having to deal with this made me a little crazy in that I became an extreme risk taker and like to jump off roofs of houses, ride down the street standing on my bicycle seat and often riding my bicycle without hands on handlebars for miles or jumping curbs with my bicycle. This gave me the freedom to feel I was still alive. Some people might withdraw from blunt trauma epilepsy. However, I would take my life to the limit in reaction to it in every physical way I could to demonstrate to myself that I hadn't died each time I had a seizure. IT was sort of like saying, "I'm still alive World!" or "You can't kill me. I'm still alive and kicking!"

My intensity around all this sort of scared some people who were shrinking violets in their lives. But, because of the nearness of death in my life from ages 10 to 15 I found embracing death was the easiest way to overcome my fears. So, because I was big for my age people usually left me alone in this. I found myself the protector of people who were picked on in school and people usually found me to big for my age to mess with.

So, when I look back at this way of looking at things it was sort of a suicidal approach to life. It wasn't that I was going to take my life directly. It was that epilepsy was so crazy that coming near to death in physical ways when I wasn't having a seizure made me feel like I was still alive and not dead yet. So, climbing cliffs, riding bicycles like a stunt man, Scuba diving from age 12, snorkeling from age 8 or ten in the ocean, anything that was risky and fun I was doing it if I felt I could survive it.

Also, it is important to understand the psychology of the 1950s. World War II had killed about 900,000 Americans and people had had to take amazing risks and many died. So, there was still a very crazy risk taking point of view that Americans still had then. Even when I was a child I think about 1 child in 5 didn't survive until age 10 because so many childhood diseases hadn't been eliminated yet. One of my best friends had had to have leg braces from Polio on until he was 6 or 8 years of age. However, when I met him at 10 he was taking over my newspaper route from me as I was giving it up. I didn't tell him that I had to give up my paper route because I was starting to have seizures at night. We later became friends in Junior High School when we moved to another school district and he was a new student at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Glendale in 1960 like me.

So, writing can heal your soul, help you understand yourself or others better. It can to many many things to help you and others survive their lives better.

My wife has a master's degree in business and was valedictorian of her prep school in high school. But she likely wouldn't do a blog like mine because she is too much of a perfectionist. For me, it is sort of like I'm having a conversation with you. I don't think of this as writing because I can type as fast as I talk. So for me now writing (typing) is like talking to you over the Internet. We all are different with different likes and dislikes and skills. I just like sharing what might be helpful and useful to you in your lives. This is why I write. I want the human race to survive and not go extinct during the next 100 to 500 years. So, I write to help keep us all alive as a human race on Earth so we can colonize other worlds.