As many of you already know, I had an unusual upbringing. Among other things, I was raised effectively “outside” religion – my parents were pretty firmly against organized religion of any kind, and as such I never went to services of any kind. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t keep me from developing a spirituality and belief system all on my own, however.
One of the pillars of the system I created for myself was a belief that if you showed the universe that you were up to the task for something, that you were good enough, skilled enough, smart enough to do something, that the universe would oblige and give you the opportunity to prove yourself. I say this was a core tenet because it’s one of the things that most strongly shaped my childhood choices and thus, as a result, the person I became.
When I was a kid, I really wanted nothing more than to live a life like those of the characters in my favorite books, which were mostly adventure novels set in the 18th century, like Treasure Island or Kidnapped or Johnny Tremain. I was also highly enamoured of the characters in movies like Indiana Jones, Legends of the Fall, etc. I wanted that life. I used to wish so hard that some day I’d wake up and I’d be living a life like one of those stories. I wanted to be an adventurer.
As per my belief system, I dealt with this wish by deciding to learn as many relevant skills as I could. I went to NOLs camps that taught wilderness survival skills. I learned how to do basic woodworking and metalworking. I found a local tall ship can convinced them to take me on as crew at only 12 years old (which is bonkers, in retrospect). I found a local reenacting group and learned everything I could about living in the 18th century. I positively devoured books – my shelves at home hold approximately 240 linear feet of books (roughly 2500-2800 books), all read before age 18, most of them non-fiction.
As I entered college and later, the real world, I actually resented this background for a good long while. It made me feel not only like my skills were mismatched for the world around me, but also that the rest of the world didn’t understand where I was coming from most of the time. This, friends, is where perspective is key.
I spent years feeling like I’d made a mistake by sticking so firmly to my path as a kid, that I’d somehow fucked up by allowing childhood naivety and a surprisingly firm belief in my view of the universe’s workings to direct that path and thus the direction of my life.
But in the last year or so, I’ve had some things happen, and met some people who have helped me to see things very differently.
I didn’t make a mistake as a kid; I managed to make those wishes that I worked so hard for come true. In it’s own way, the universe did, in fact, give me what I wanted, as much as was really possible. The life I’ve led is pretty incredible, if I look at it with enough scope.
I spent 14 years working on ships and boats, 7 of them on tall ships. I’ve made two trans-Atlantic crossings and watched the sunrise from the top of a mast. I’ve lived on the side of a mountain in Switzerland for months, in a 500 year old shepherd hut in France for months, and in a rural apartment in South Korea for years. I’ve learned to fly and to sail. I’ve helped fly a single-engine plane from Texas to the Arctic Circle and back, and nearly crashed in the Canadian Rockies in the process. I’ve become a skilled historical reenactor and have had more than my share of moments in which the world aligns in such a way that I’m not really sure which century I’m really in. I’ve managed to hack my biology to the extent that I’m able to go through 99% of my life as a man and these days I no longer even think about the difference most of the time. I’ve been asked to lead a field research expedition on horseback in Mongolia, and I owned a sidecar motorcycle for many years and learned how to fix them. If you plopped me down in one of my childhood books or movies that I loved so dearly, I’d do pretty damn well.
Those wishes? All that effort I put into them? It worked. I just didn’t realize that the process of getting there was what was granting them. I thought that if I worked hard enough, the universe would put me where I wanted to be, without realizing that through that work, I’d walked there myself.
