Yesterday’s post spoke about the absence of purpose v. the presence of purpose.
In it I indicated much of the hardship that I had been going through in the pursuit of my own purpose – to help bring people together in peace!
Why exactly that is my purpose, I don’t know. But, it is one of those things that if I don’t pursue, then I feel as if I have failed.
I feel that this is best likened to the story of Jonah and the whale. If you are familiar with the story … you may understand, if you don’t, well then you certainly won’t. Regardless, Jonah’s Wale of a tale is for another time.
Now returning, my vision was to help neighbors to be able to “see the law” and as a result be able to prevent the entering into needless conflict, which in turn would greatly assist to bring about peace.
Did it work? Not very well as I had it originally formulated. You see, lawyers are paid for time in conflict. And while, my skill is to get people out of conflict, I like to do it quickly.
And guess what … lawyers are paid on time in conflict! Big problem.
So, with all my might, my attempts to change the system through the generation of my “Legal Geometrics” and “Legal Data Visualizations” has not (yet) generated adequate results.
And this is where it gets tricky. Do I stay with it as if “perfecting sealing wax” and risk a ’20th nervous breakdown.’ See [HERE]. Or, do I put it on the shelf and come back to it later?
Now, that’s a very interesting question. It would be incredibly awesome if I had been in the place of Steve Job’s decision to put the iPad on the shelf to first go after the iPod. Listen [HERE].
The reality though is that kind of decision quite likely would end up being a path choice akin to that of Robert Frost’s “A Road Less Traveled” … which in this post from my other channel I explained with considerable aid from other’s research means almost exactly the opposite of what everyone believes it to mean. …
To wit … the path is the right choice, because the path chose was the choice! See [HERE].
The result? I was stuck at that crossroads for a long, long time!
I’d take a bit of work here and a bit of work there to have some sort of income, but was my heart in it? Hell no!
But, I couldn’t walk away from the idea … this was my purpose, and my vision was to be able to bring people to peace through it so I had a vision too.
The problem though was that I didn’t have a goal.
Now, perhaps it would have been great to have the goal to completely change the Real Estate Broker/Title Insurance/Mortgage Lender slight of hand that allows these errors to exist virtually everywhere … but what would that do?
At this point, forcing that issue would bring good neighbors into conflict where non currently exists … and does that serve my purposeful vision? No it does not!
So, again stuck, stuck, stuck, years on end past, years on end future … until my soul is spun off this planet or falls in to it.
And then something happened. I found out that I might be able to get involved with a bicycle company. Well, now I have always loved bicycles.
- I learned how to ride a bicycle the very first day that it was finally given to me at age 6 – instead of age 5 as all the other kids in the neighborhood with the starter bike given to me.
- I converted my second bike … a cherry red, original banana seat and “Easy-Rider” handle bars “Schwinn” to a motorbike when that original style’s “wheels [culturally] came off” metaphorically akin to that movie’s end. See [HERE].
- I worked my tail off – though no doubt my father thought was candy-ass – at a sub-standard rate one summer by any normal kid’s assessment in the neighborhood in which I grew up digging out garden pilings to make enough money that I could buy a 12-Speed Kabuki bicycle which was my last real bike.
See, we moved to Santa Fe, NM where because of the size of the narrow and generally dirt streets, it’s appropriate to have a mountain bike.
One big problem! Where to get the money? For a kid, Santa Fe was not nearly as easy to earn money as a kid as it was up in Minneapolis.
In the former, in addition to summer caddying, there was (and to the best of my knowledge still is) always grass to mow, or leaves to rake, or snow to throw. Santa Fe didn’t have that … and money didn’t otherwise flow.
My Kabuki did make it with me to college and then up here to Seattle. In fact, that reminds that one of the things that I wanted most when I came up here after graduating from school were 3 things I could straddle: a motorcycle; a snowmobile; and a horse!
These haven’t happened, though I did purchase an ride a motorcycle when I lived in Taiwan. That was like running was akin to “running with the bulls in Spain!” And again, that’s a story for another day.
The fact of the matter is that I just forgot about how much I love to straddle these modes of transport … it’s freedom!
But, what the heck does this have to do in any respect with purpose and vision.
Well, I see as a vision using these wooden bicycles as a means of bringing families together with a woodworker who can teach and oversee them building their own bicycles during a time while the family goes “off grid” and with it has a chance to cut out the discord that our fractured world and the tech within it has generally afforded most families … and in doing so, not only would these families have a memorable experience, they would have a memento afterward of the time that they had spent together … and could do so again on bike outings in the future.
See, that’s my vision! So, what’s the goal? Well, that will come in due course.
For now, after an incredibly long period of my soul’s drought, I have essentially found my wellspring … fresh water again flows!