This is likely the key sentence here: "The world is not a static place and if you cannot get a grip on the present then you are lost in the past." (and someone lost in the past often fades out or takes their own life at some point.)
How did I accomplish this?
By breaking free of preconceived notions of the 1950s. If I had stayed in the notions I was given growing up I would have ended my life by age 25.
So, the only way I could survive the 1950s and 1960s was to recreate myself to be a different person with different values than I was raised with.
It was not that the values and mores I was raised with were wrong it was that they were inappropriate for the world I was living in. So, I had to adapt to the world as it was and not adapt to the world the way it had been in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
I had to be living in the late 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and now 2010 to 2020s in order to survive my life.
The world is not a static place and if you cannot get a grip on the present then you are lost in the past. In my 20s I finally realized this in college. One day I was about 21 or 22 and I found a Psychology Today in the College Library which was a magazine popular at the time. My parents had no experience with psychology at all except their own homespun version of it. So, when I first opened this issue of Psychology Today it was a complete revelation to me. It allowed me to realize I could give up 90% of the weight of my ancestors stuff and just take care of myself. It allowed me to realize that all I had to do was to keep myself alive and not the weight of the past too.
So, I broke free of all the constraints of the past and forged my own way into the future. I recreated myself as my own parent as my own child to become a man I could stand to be and still stay alive.
I have never regretted this decision because at the time it was a life or death decision for me.
So, I have continued to re-create myself by God's Grace ever since.
Why get locked in the past and die when you can be the future and stay alive by the Grace of God?
This realization in my life came in this college library around 1971 at Palomar College in San Marcos. Palomar college at the time was the best college experience I had growing up. Though I eventually made it to UCSC in Santa Cruz at a junior level I was in my late 30s married raising 4 kids (three teenagers and a baby) so the UCSC experience didn't come until around 1989. So, this time (2 years and 60 units of college work) was my best and most helpful college experience which allowed me to begin to start my own businesses starting in 1978 from then on. I kept thinking I was 28 when I started my first business but I'm realizing now I was 30 in 1978 so I must have been 30 when I got my first business started. And I needed to start one or more businesses like I did in order to support my son as when I was 29 I was a single father but at that point my mother and father also helped me raise my son until I remarried in 1980 in Mt. Shasta a lady with 2 kids of her own from her first marriage.
Life is a lot to survive. We all know this. From my point of view I have the attitude of an adventurer more than most people. But, what is an adventure?
It is a difficult experience well managed so you survive it and can tell great stories about it later!
My life has been an adventure and an amazing one at that!
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