Thoughts on my life

 After reading my essays I wrote in College on my life being born and growing up I thought I might address some of the things I went through in my 20s. I think it's important to remember that you only need to get a few things right in life to make it work for you. In some ways it is very simple. For example, if my father had told me outright "You will be an electrician just like my father and your uncles were too" likely I wouldn't have questioned much my father and would have sort of obediantly at age 18 done this. However, this isn't what happened.

To my father and mother since they were not allowed to go to college when they were 18 during the Great Depression for many different reasons, they saw college as like a Temple on the hill or a Castle on the Hill that looked pretty good to them. But, because they had never been to college at all they had no real idea what college was really like. Here's where I came into the picture:

I was told literally: "YOU can be anything you want to be. ANYTHING" (if you go to college). So, naively I approached all this but what happened actually confused me more than anything else. It's not that college didn't help me (it did a lot). It's just that what it did for me was COMPLETELY unexpected both by me and everyone I knew.

In otherwords it had entirely different influences than I or my parents could ever have figured out then in 1966 when I first entered college in the fall at Glendale College which was a community city college where I lived. My best friend studied Jet engine maintenance because he didn't want to be drafted into the war and die on the front lines so he could join the air force as a jet engine mechanic so he went to Thailand to an American Air base where he worked on B-52 bombers and fighter jet engines during the Viet Nam War.

However, my father took me to a doctor and I got a 4F for the Draft which meant that I would never be drafted unless the mainland of the U.S. was attacked. In other words they were not going to sent me to Viet Nam to die or get PTSD.

So, college because of this was a very different experience for me than for others attending college at this point. Also, if you went to college seriously with enough units and got a C or better then you got what was then called a "Student Deferment" which meant that you wouldn't be drafted. My cousin got a student deferment going to college to become a lawyer and later got a further deferment after becoming a lawyer by working for VISTA which was then sort of like the Peace Core in the U.S. mainland by working as a lawyer for Vista in California then.

So, college for me became a way to meet people and a way to understand myself and my life better. However, the problem was I was a scientific Creationist at the time which means to me at least now that I did not believe or even understand then Darwinism. So, when I took a social science class in college I realized that most people in college were not like me and I was very disturbed by a belief system then that believed fervently in Darwinism. I was so upset by this that it caused me to drop out of college and to work for a year in Hollywood for a travel publications company that sent travel indexes all over the world to mainly travel agents who wanted to book clients into hotels around the world. As you can see this was 40 years before the Internet existed which is how things are done now.

So, when I dropped out of college in late fall of 1966 because of a conflict between Creationism and Darwinism I was very disturbed by this. So, it took me about 3 years to realize that Creationism was a theory and darwinism was a theory and that I didn't have to believe in either theory because they were both theories and not laws. They were just theories that some people believed in.

So, by age 21 I had moved forward to a new way of looking at things that worked much better for me. To more fully understand my 20s you have to understand what a religious person I was in my teens. Then I moved from being a religious person during my 20s to becoming a "spiritual but NOT religious Person". 

This was a complete change for me that basically saved my life from suicide. Religion was moving me towards suicide and becoming spiritual but not religious saved my life. I'm ONLY alive today because I became "Spiritual but not religious".

This is the fundamental thing to know about why I survived my 20s.

Where College did take me.

My first career was as a computer operator and I also learned to be a computer programmer in Fortran and Cobol which were two computer languages used then and also now by many programmers. Later I learned Basic by 1980 which I also taught my children to program their own video games by 1980. I also learned MS Dos which predated Windows 95 which was an easier operating system than before along with all the other Windows operating systems since.

Then I was studying in my 20s to become a psychologist studying psychology, philosophy, Anthropology and Social Science. I did this in San Diego Area colleges in my early 20s. However, I kept going to college classes even after my first child was born in 1974 when I got married too. So, college helped me in immeasurable ways throughout my life but not at all in any of the ways my parents or I thought it would.

So, college I tend to see now as being sort of like a Hammer. You can build a home for yourself with a hammer or hurt people with it including yourself. College is potentially extremely powerful and some people can handle the changes it puts them through and some people cannot.

So, whether college helps you or hurts you or both you don't know until you try going to college.

Everyone is different. Eventually I found I liked owning businesses which I also learned from college classes initially too. I didn't like working for other people and I liked setting my own hours and completely engineering my own life from beginning to end. For me, College was a first step in becoming very successful in life. 

However, it was always a surprise every day at the changes it put me and every one I know through by going to college. Just remember my "Hammer" idea because I find it most completely explains how you can build a life or home with that hammer or you can hurt others or yourself or both by what you learn in college.

It's not really what college is it's what YOU do with it that matters both for yourself and all others your life touches throughout your potentially long life. I'm presently 75 and going to college is one of the many reasons I'm still alive at 75.

By God's Grace