Introduction
"If you are among the lucky ones, you get to live once. If you are among the unwise, you may neglect to live at all." I am sure that some wise man said that, or some approximation of it, but regardless I am co-opting this for myself and endeavoring to incorporate it as guidance for my own life. This story begins in the summer of 2009. It is during this time that I find myself desperately concerned that I am squandering my life as the days and weekends fly by and I feel too tired to take advantage of them. Taking a break from my conditioned response of telling myself, "Things could be worse," I decide to see what I can do to make things better.
I don't think there is a more deleterious phrase than, "Things could be worse". I have heard these words, or subtle variants, all my life. I've heard them when I was younger and would complain about things I didn't think were fair. I've heard them at work when something didn't go according to plan, but was salvageable. I hear this all the time and I believe that it is the mantra of the "settler". If we as Americans, or as citizens of the planet Earth, are going to approach our potential, we need to strike this poisonous idiom from our vocabulary and replace it with, "How can I make it better?"
With that brief tirade behind us, this tome is about how I decided to get off my butt and start looking for meaning in my life. When I originally envisioned writing this, I was going to use the word "happiness" instead of "meaning". However, as the summer progressed I found that personally I could only find happiness through meaning and I swapped the words. The end effect is the same, but the significance is important. At least to me it is. Having started out with a goal of an adventure every week, I quickly found this to be unsustainable. Sure it was good to have this as an ambition and to watch my writing grow as my adventures progressed (Or feel the pangs of guilt when they stagnated), but it was too rigorous.
Through a variety of websites hawking "once in a lifetime experiences", I was able to find as many of those as my meager bankroll could support and I won't deny enjoying them. The adrenaline rush is awesome, but it quickly fades. Like any addiction, the chase of that rush can be very costly. The truth of the matter was that there was no meaning to it. Plus, to outside observers, it just looked like a midlife crisis, minus the expensive and obligatory sports car. As they say with love, you find it when you aren't looking for it, and that is how I stumbled across something that has given me meaning, purpose, happiness, sadness, and made me feel like I was alive for the first time in a very long while. I also learned a lot about myself through deliberate reflection and writing my accounts of what I was seeing and doing.
So, lest I find a way to condense my whole story into one page, I think it is time for the story to unfold.
