20180617 Weekly Update

Greetings one and all.  Father’s Day is here and I hope the fathers among us have found appreciation and love this grand day.  My Instagram today reflects this holiday and I am pleased to know several people who celebrate.  I send all my well wishes to those who have the difficult and challenging task of being a good father, role model and provider to their family.  The times are never easy and the thanks are not always there.  May we all find the strength to do what is right and be the person we always want to see in others.

My Instagram fave this week is one I hope reaches many others looking for a path in life, a direction to follow or a passion to live.  I continue to fight the good fight as I make the best with what I have and who I am.  May we all find the path that makes life the adventure of our choosing.

Every day is a call to arms. A challenge to accomplish something so incredible we will someday look back with pride at the dreams we fought for, the life we lived and the worlds we conquered. Onwards! +

The fave FB post this day is one regarding the encouragement of others.  Few friends or family ever thought my interests were worth following, so I had a specific opinion after giving up on my writing for many years only to return after seeing what constant work at a meaningless job felt like.  I can only hope others learn this much earlier than myself.

 

Question: How do people handle no support from family or friends?

My Answer: Few people will ever understand the life of a creative. We see what others don’t and craft worlds out of thin air. As much as I would like to have my friends and family understand and support me, I am always grateful to be one of the folks who have gone it alone and lived beyond the constraints of life. The adventure may only happen in my mind, but I’d rather enjoy the journey alone than abandon it to feel support working a mind-numbing job with a “promising” future.

 

As a special personal note, I thought I would share a memory of my father when I was a child, still struggling with the world and my place in it.

One day when I was very upset about being bullied and called names at school, my father sat with me in my room and told me that I would one day be a strong man who could do whatever he put his mind to and nobody would take that away.  Being a scrawny kid, I doubted his words and told him so, telling him how weak I was and how I didn’t know anything.

He said I would grow stronger and knew for a fact that I would learn my own way in time.  He then seemed to get distracted by the books next to my bed and took one of them from the shelf.  It was The Invisible Man.  He flipped the pages and shook his head, saying he liked to read National Geographic but could never read books because they were too hard.

Looking at the cover, he asked what the story was about.  I explained how it was about a man who became invisible and slowly went crazy because of it.  The story was exciting to convey and I remembered every scene as if I were reading it again.  The scenes came alive in my mind as I described them, feeling the excitement of anonymity followed by the terror of being hunted.

He listened patiently, nodding his head as I told him the story before putting it back on my shelf and taking another one.  The next one was The Time Machine.  He asked about it as well and I went into a long explanation about the future times, the wars and monstrous Morlocks, telling him of the adventures had by the traveler who wanted to witness the future beyond his grasp, eventually vanishing from his own time to save the future.

The next one was Alice in Wonderland, followed by Animal Farm.  I don’t remember the rest, but after a while, I realized what my father was telling me was true.  I read books often and loved to sit in the library, reading and choosing new tales, feeling as if the books of the world were mountains we could all climb, making our own journey at the turn of a page.

I lost my father a few years before graduating high school but the lessons learned in my youth stay with me, guiding me in this journey and showing me what I could be when I didn’t know the world itself was an adventure waiting to be experience each and every day. Onwards!