Surviving one's life

My father was a very driven man, a Type A person. He was valedictorian of his high School Senior Class. He wanted to become an Electrical Engineer. His father wouldn't let him because it was 1934 and the Great Depression was on. He never forgave his father for this.

I tried to be as driven as my father was. This didn't work mainly because I had had Whooping Cough at age 2 and Blunt Trauma Childhood Epilepsy from ages 10 to 15. So, though I didn't understand this I still had the Pioneer Spirit just like all my Ancestors since they came form Switzerland in 1725 to the United States. So, what I was was a Survivor. I knew how to survive literally anything. If a ship sank I would always be one of the survivors of any catastrophe. But, that did not mean I was a Type A driven person. Because even if I was to have been that type of person after having whooping Cough and Childhood epilepsy it would have meant my young death. Some part of me knew this.

So, I spent my teens and early 20s trying to live up to my father's expectations of me and this literally almost killed me until I was about 24 or 25. When I was 26 and married for the first time and had a baby son we moved to Hawaii. I began to see the neurosis of our whole western culture there. I noticed that someone (for thousands of years) could have simply hung out at the beach and fished and picked mangoes and papayas and coconuts and been okay and happy.

This was sort of a revelation to me at the time and I realized that western civilization was so neurotic because of having to survive snowy winters which weren't really a part of the original man on earth life. Likely this wsa brought about through wars and people having to move and explore to survive weather, food shortages and water shortages and warfare and over populations in some areas.

This time living on the big island of Hawaii in 1974 in Hilo with my new wife and new son opened my eyes a lot and I began to see life all over the earth in a much different way than before. I saw western civilization as more a reaction to snow and ice and cold and not being able to grow food in the winter more than anything else.

So, people had to get very busy in the spring and summer to survive their winters and this is what made our western northern European and U.S. and Canadian civilization exactly what it was.

So, I was a part of the survival neurosis of living in colder climates where it is more of a struggle to survive.

This put everything in such a different context that I became aware of why I had been having a problem with trying to be like my father who was so driven.

However, it might be important for you to know that my father also charted a Yacht in 1939 and spent two years with his brother and wife going to Tahiti and the Tuomoto Archipeligo and eventually taking a steampship to Hawaii and then home to Seattle to work for his father as an Electrician again in early 1941 because the war had started in the Pacific. He told me he just couldn't get used to living on Bananas and Papayas and fish because he couldn't be laid back over there and be happy at that time with his brother and wife. He enjoyed it a lot but realized he was not a Polynesian native and was kind of glad to get back to Seattle and to get back to work even though his wife stayed for a year in Honolulu before she came back to Seattle.(This was his first wife). My mother was his second wife he married in 1946.

So, when I finally came back to the mainland in California my father and Uncle had started a mining company (part time for them) and they needed someone like me and a friend of mine who was an architect with his degree from Cal Poly to be working partners with our expenses paid in refurbishing a mining mill that they had purchased in 29 Palms. So, we lived at my father retirement home in Yucca Mesa near Yucca Valley, so it was about a 30 minutes drive from where we were living to the Mining mill where we worked Monday through Friday refurbishing it.

We also helped set up our mining operations in the Virginia Dale Mining district and in Gila Bend, Arizona. Though my father and I eventually sold our shares of this business what I learned about people having ideas and turning them into reality in a business was priceless.

At that time the Price of Gold went from around 32 dollars an ounce up to maybe $300 to $600 dollars an ounce. My uncle was a Gold Trader and needed a way to have write offs so his taxes wouldn't skyrocket along with the price of Gold. So, by financing this business he had the write offs he needed as well as the potential to make more money. Often a business after investments into it can then become a Cash Cow under some circumstances and become self perpetuating and not financially draining like businesses usually are when you first start them.

So, from learning about how people take ideas and turn them into real businesses I faced the rest of my life with new experiences and ideas of how to live my life. Though my first wife and I broke up when I was 29 and she 26 and I became a single parent of a then 3 year old son, my life then had a good start and I had a reason to stay alive to raise my son right to adulthood. He now has a Bachelor of Science degree now and is a teacher and just got married and will have his own son in June or July. So, life goes on.

But, surviving from ages 21 to 24 was a real chore and I barely succeeded in this until I realized I was a survivor but not a type A and not a driven person. I realized I am an Idea Man and my goal I realized was to always work smarter not necessarily harder. I have watched so many people literally work themselves to death with nothing to show for it. With a little more thought and a little less plodding they could have had a much better life. I was lucky to survive my early 20s at all. But somehow I did. Be a survivor first. If you are so driven it kills you in your teens or twenties what good is that?