The Hero’s Path

I don’t want this place to be where all I talk about kids and family and the day to day minutae. Seriously, don’t we all get enough of that kind of crap on Facebook? I think I need this place to be about me, sort of like it was in the beginning until it morphed into an unholy combination of photos of kids and blowjob references (the blowjob references my not stop however. Can’t fight who I am!)

 

“Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.”

Barbara Bush

 

The only time I would ever quote that woman. I have been into quotes lately, not only as a validation of what I think but to send messages out to the world of the kind of person I am or want to be. I started this diary in 2001, not long after Emma was born. I was working at the county on an IT project at the time and was doing a lot of boring office work (I was in charge of the Excel files we use to catalog every computer in the county). I actually still have an old download of that diary. I was different then, a new father, not having any idea how that happened and certainly not even close to grown up enough to realize what was going on.

A lot has changed since then. I have had several different jobs, had another child, been on numerous vacations, did some extremely stupid things that altered the course of my life and marriage. I’ve made lots of mistakes and for the last 5 years or so I have been trying to right the course of my life as a father, a husband, an employee and a man. I have said many times that I am heading the right direction, taking steps on the Hero’s path (see Joseph Campbell). Until now, until just this year I have never really been on that path. I am now.

 
“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

Joseph Campbell

 

This year has been…fantastic and joyful and filled with new outlooks, new maturities, a new body. I have been swimming, three to four thousand meters a week, and have lost 10 kilograms (about 22 pounds). I am so much more full of energy. I have been working on being even more patient with everyone (I have a tendency to grumble even when I am doing the things that are asked of me). I have been embracing life, the little things, finding the joy in the simplest of pleasures. My job has…gained a future that it never had before. I have my 70% permanent swimming position but my new boss is excited about my vast experience in computers and next school year I will also be the IT contact. I feel more like an adult, more responsible.

This year has also been a year of change, a year of upheaval, a year of stress and revelations and uncertainty in some matters, much of which I have been furiously writing about privately. I have learned that life is not as easy, marriage is not as easy, as you think it is. But these are all challenges to be overcome. Mistakes are learning possibilities, events where you learn something about yourself and can decide what to change and what to strengthen.

 

“What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning – and some of them many times over – what do you find? That you can swim? Well – life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!”

 

Alfred Adler

 

Through everything that has happened in the past year, the good and the bad, the joyful and sorrowful, I know that these things and how I react to them is the measure of me, as a human, as a man. For the first time in my adult life I am considering what I know and what I do and how that fits into who I am, who I want to become. I am reflecting more, analyzing my mistakes, working on how to improve myself, make myself into the man I want to become. I have spent my whole life sitting back and letting life come to me. And my quality of taking what comes and making the best of it is a good one. But I am finally waking up to who I am and who I want to be and taking control, pushing myself to be the man I want to be. It is the Hero’s path and I am on it.

 

“What we think, we become.”

Buddha

 

Zaphod