The Journey Chapter 66: Weighing Options and Living in the Moment

BACK TO OCEAN SHORES I GO

But not for long. Three days to finish the chores I was asked to complete, and then back to Olympia to gather my thoughts and decide where I want to go next.

I was online looking at the website “Foundation for Intentional Community,” basically commune-type properties scattered around the U.S. where like-minded people live together to live purposeful, intentional, deliberate lives.

Fascinating. I wouldn’t mind visiting one or two of them during my travels, see what it’s all about. I’m wide open to new adventures. Hey, if I can’t sail around Saturn in this lifetime, I need to do something for stimulation besides learning to play the harmonica.

P.S. I think I finally have a plan through November. Stay tuned.

YOU DON’T NEED TO LIVE IN A BUS TO LIVE INTENTIONALLY AND DELIBERATELY

Consider what I have said about living intentionally, so far, to be like Elementary School.  It’s now time to move ahead to Middle School.

I gave you an example of Bev and I living intentionally, living deliberately, earlier in this missive.  What I feel I need to point out is you don’t have to go to the extremes that Bev and I have gone through. The important thing about living an intentional life is to not be a human pinball, guided by the randomness of life around you, or guided by the purposefulness around you.  If you are working just to pay bills, if you feel trapped in a loveless marriage, or trapped in an unfulfilling job, or simply trapped in any way, shape, or form, it is my belief that you do something to become untrapped.  It is my belief that life should be lived as a fulfilled, happy, and peaceful human, and that peacefulness includes your state of mind.

An example of this just happened again, on my Facebook feed. I mentioned to a Facebook group that I belong to, a dog owner’s club, that Maggie and I would be in the Port Townsend area sometime in November, and for members who live up there to be on the lookout for our rainbow-colored bus.  Someone in the group said she hopes, one day, to be able to travel in a rainbow bus with her dog.  I didn’t respond but, if I had, my response would have been “what’s stopping you? Why can’t you? If you truly want that, begin taking the steps, now, to make it happen, and don’t wait until you are eighty, sitting in the assisted living home, wondering why you didn’t do it while you had multiple chances to do so.”

Let me repeat, and I mean this completely: I really do believe that a large percentage of people live lives of quiet desperation, lamenting missed opportunities, feeling trapped in a life with no exit doors, or so they believe, and it is my contention that, in most of those cases, the only thing preventing them from escaping those lives of desperation is the person despairing.

You owe it to yourself to be happy.  You owe it to yourself to find a way to produce that happiness. You are not some amoebae floating helplessly in the ocean, tossed to and fro by gigantic waves.  You have free will. You have all of the physical and mental tools necessary to find a path to happiness.  And if you choose to sit on your posterior and blame your state of life on bad luck or mean people or the unfairness of the system, shame on you.

You are wasting the greatest gift given to you.

A PLAN TAKING SHAPE

Spent the morning with Bev and the dogs, walking trails around Olympia, running errands, getting coffee . . . a very nice morning, thank you very much, and at some point during that walk my immediate plans took shape. Mind you, my idea of planning probably will never resemble your idea of planning.  Mine is kind of a loosey-goosey planning approach, barely more than an outline, ethereal if you will, but it works for me.

Here it is: one more week in Ocean Shores, finishing tasks the owner asked me to do. Back to Olympia for a week, preparing for the next leg in the journey, which will be about two weeks in Eastern Washington, thank God for dryness, then back to Olympia for a week, followed by a week in Northern Washington in the Sequim area. That should take me into late November. I would have more plans for late November and into December, but that would require much more brain power than I want to expend on this topic.

The only commitment I have as I peer into December is my yearly wellness visit with the doctor on December 6^th.

I will keep an eye on the weather as November unfolds. I suspect the weather will have a strong influence on any other plans I announce.

So there you go!

I have a lot of videos planned. I have many more blog entrees planned.  And, if the Google gods are smiling upon me, someone other than my friends, God bless each and every one of you, will watch those videos and read those blogs.

Some of the videos will finally show you some geography heretofore not seen on this channel, and I’m sure many of you will be grateful for that. I look forward to visiting numerous small towns in Eastern Washington and talking to many small-town people.

Shaking hands along the way.

I hope you can join me on the journey and, if you have not done so already, please subscribe to our YouTube channel under the name As We Wonder.