Thursday, 5 February 2009. Eimear, I believe in the power of not believing. Do not put unnecessary expectations on the future so that what happens to you, no matter how wonderful, will surprise you.
As I told you earlier this week, Thursday (today) was going to be a day of decision-making. What the decision(s) would concern, I did not know and did not try to comprehend (Je ne comprends pas le futur, I suppose I could say, perhaps incorrectly, in the little French I remember from high school).
Yesterday was a day for good news. My family learned from the doctor that all is well for a family member. In addition, the dean of the local campus of a technical institute arranged an interview with me on Friday for an adjunct teaching position. I also got an email from a friend who wanted to talk about a business deal.
This morning, I woke up but could not concentrate because my thoughts were jumping from one good feeling to another. Even so, I thought back to my earlier plans to make today a special day for determining my future, in this case with the word "future" having more of an unsure feeling, as if I planned today to say goodbye to myself or at least get rid of my "self" as in the old "me," making way for the new "me" to take over what I've recently thought were the resources being hogged and wasted by the previous self.
Now, I sit here coming down from an adrenaline high. You've told me what brings you ultimate joy is the happiness you see in your daughter's laughter, which adds to your sense of wealth. I have no children so my sense of joy comes from what makes me go to sleep while trying not to build excitement of what I'll wake up to feeling in the first minutes and hours of the morning of the next day in unbridled anticipation of what the rest of the day will bring.
This morning, I only expected to shed the skin of my old self. I placed no other burdens on me, so that there would be no debts I felt the old self had left to pay off that would force me to keep perpetuating the old "me."
Now, how I purge my old selves has been a personal secret of mine, but certainly nothing new to the thoughts of other humans like me. I am not inventing something new here but simply applying age-old secrets of the phoenix to my life. I may yet share the secret with you. We'll see. hehe
My old selves have their stories to tell because they have existed in a cycle of birth, living, and death, every self giving an example of one person's way to deal with the stimuli s/he faced. Occupationally, the selves have served as a lawn boy, piano refinisher, fast food cook, store clerk, college student, baritone horn musician (Georgia Tech Navy ROTC marching/jazz band), fast food cashier, restaurant cook, door-to-door book salesman, telephone book deliverer, engineering assistant, technical typist, computer systems operator, computer graphics illustrator, control room specialist, data analyst, test engineer, engineering project manager, senior program manager, company owner/president and consultant. The common thread I see, the essence of all of these versions of me, is the part that records on "paper" the major and minor events of each self's existence, including language patterns in the form of verbalized thoughts, as well as physical whereabouts of a self such as attending the showing of a movie picture, consuming food in a public place, etc., and putting these recordings into stories. Basically what all humans have done from the dawn of time.
In recording these stories, I have created works of fiction I've told you about and posted on my website (http://www.treetrunkproductions.org) as well as works of nonfiction, such as school reports, guides to the use of hardware and software (called user manuals), test plans, program management plans, business plans, etc.
The works of fiction I have given to the world for free because they belong to everyone as my repayment for their participation in my life, even if marginally as a member of the species, Homo sapiens, who wanders anywhere on or near this planet.
The works of nonfiction have served as the barter I exchange for labor credits (i.e., money) I use to make a viable place for me to live with other humans in the social system we call the economy (the one you and I might see as naturally capitalistic because of our upbringing under the political system called the United States of America).
One of the works of nonfiction that I devoted a good bit of time to back in October 2008 was a business plan I put together for a group of inventors and investors who had come up with a product that has no market. In fact, their product creates the market. Therefore, my business plan had to include not only the usual financial incentives to entice investors (legal rigmarole) but also describe the product and its potential market in some detail. I shared the business plan with the team of inventors and they agreed that the plan described what they wanted to productize (after he suggested it, I added a nine-page product description written by one of the inventors that gave the product more clarity to an uninformed reader). The plan included either a way to form an S / C corporation or a limited liability corporation (LLC), depending on what the inventors and/or future investors wanted.
A week or so ago, I went to lunch with a former work colleague of mine whom I consider a great man. He and his wife have raised wonderful children while he has created for himself a good sales/marketing vocation, mainly at the company where I worked with him. He played hockey and tennis while growing up in Canada but has lived in the Huntsville area for over 20 years now and calls this area home. Through his sports and business connections, he has established a good network of friends he calls upon when he either needs to give or receive advice.
At lunch, where I just expected us to talk about what we'd done in the past few years, our conversation led to my interest in the business plan I'd developed in October. I bounced a high-level idea of the product and a general biography of the inventors off my friend to gauge his interest. He said he was willing to hear more so I got him to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), allowing me to disclose in full detail the product the inventor team had put together up to now.
During our phone conversation earlier today, my friend said he had looked over the business plan and is more than excited to get involved in the product's marketability. In fact, I was surprised at his enthusiasm. He was excited enough about the product that he had told a colleague highly placed in the Huntsville business world about the general principles of the product, seeing if his colleague would want to join him in making the product successful. More than that, he told his colleague that I would be the one to run the company!
Well, that got me shaking like a leaf. One of my dreams since childhood that I started nurturing in sixth grade as I sold stickers shaped like UT football helmets from my school locker, imagining myself an entrepreneur (making pure profit on the sale since I had gotten the stickers for free from local businesses in Kingsport and Knoxville), was to run my own company one day. That's why I now have my own consulting firm that I call Tree Trunk Productions so that I can be my own one-man CEO/President/owner of a company.
However, my recent work occupation/self was not a person who wanted to run a company of more than one person because he didn't want to serve at the whim of others. He had retired from the business world so he could be an independent person, free to follow whatever whims of his that would vary from day to day. That old self finally realized that what had first been a set of freely random actions had in fact become a patterned set of actions. Freedom was illusory, in that sense, because he had not given himself up to actually doing completely random things from moment to moment. He ended up finding a label to justify his limited set of actions and called himself a writer, even going so far as to find pride in that label and further call himself an author.
Isn't there a saying along the lines of "Pride goes before the fall"? [yes, it's an abridgement of Proverbs 16:18, according to my quick search on the Internet] Well, I knew that my pride of calling myself an author would doom me to end that author's life. In other words, by calling myself an author I had accomplished the goal that my desire to call myself an author had achieved. I did not desire to live the poor, lonely life of an author but only to call myself one. Mission accomplished! On to the next life.
So here I am, the new self, now ready to start my new life. I will interview tomorrow for a part-time teaching position that I may or may not get. Either way, I have offered my training services to another person in the training/education field and fulfilled my wish to present myself as a teacher/guru. Whether my other wish to live as a guru is fulfilled now or later in life matters not, because next week I will meet with business leaders higher up the food chain to determine my future as a company leader. Upon that I expect my future depends. What becomes of that future, I do not know, but that is what excites me today.
And now you see why I told you that patience has a payoff. For me, patiently waiting for what becomes of me has indeed been gratuitously rewarded in a way I had not expected! The new me was born today and like a newborn has this whole new world to get to know. What's more exciting than that?!
Je suis prêt à l'avenir. Le futur est maintenant!
Meanwhile, tonight we attend a funeral home visitation for a friend of my wife who died this week. Death and life are always intertwined. One should be prepared to accept both at once because one does not exist without the other ,so I say celebrate them as they do in New Orleans!!
More as it develops…
No comments:
Post a Comment