The topic that's on my mind is the idea of having a very clear mission in mind, following the objectives, and then having an abrupt pivot occur that's beyond your control, either because of the command structure that you're operating under, which could be a chain of command of one.
Which is generally how mine works. However, I do at times defer to higher authorities in my life, be it spiritual or otherwise, to where I'm going to minimize the hierarchy above me in my life as an autonomous individual.
I'd rather work in flat, politically flat teams in terms of the hierarchical structures, more of like collectives, where people are using direct democracy and having majority votes when needed, and meritocracy, when appropriate.
But I would say that there are life circumstances where the circumstances themselves become the commander.
You become subordinated to the circumstances of life.
And often that can be financial situations or health situations or other types of relationships that have an impact on the path you are taking.
And so for me right now, what's occurred is that I had established a very rigid protocol for myself of certain risks that I was going to avoid taking and certain prudent measures that I was going to implement around, limiting how much effort and energy I was gonna put into into endeavors that may be higher out on the risk curve of return on investment or potential return investment.
That's a complicated way of saying that the older I've gotten, the more I feel like the priority has got to be more simple and more humble ambitions to just be healthy and survive and not have the most unattainable dreams and goals and desires, but to prune those back into more realistic endeavors that match my energy level and my finances.
Whereas when you're younger, you have your whole life ahead of you. You can live on a prayer and gamble with big dreams and whatnot, and you have more time to fail and more opportunities to reboot when you do fail and to pivot.
But those windows of opportunities start to close, the older you get, for various reasons, it could be financial, energetic or health or otherwise, or just more responsibilities that give you less time to pursue things other than just trying to make a living in the world.
You become a little bit more jaded about changing the world.
So I had become very, very conservative in terms of my dreams and my ambitions.
I've had to become more of a realist personally.
And I think that’s a wise path. However, a set of circumstances have has arisen that has pushed me back out on that risk on behalf of someone else's health, a health crisis of someone else in my life has pushed me to say, you've got to dial back the clock about ten years on your willingness to gamble on that risk curve with your time and energy.
And you've got to pursue one of those more ambitious dreams that you had already pruned off completely, I mean, completely deprecated, an entire dimension of creativity and productivity that was, shall we say, under performing.
And, there are many ways that you wish that your hobby could be a profession, and it just doesn't materialize, not because you aren't the best at what you do, or because you don’t have great enthusiasm for it, but just there's not a what they call product market fit.
Maybe you're ahead of your time, maybe you're behind your time, but at a certain point you have to prune some of that back in order to take yourself seriously moving forward.
And I can't behave like a young person anymore. I've decided that. And in fact, when I was so in my mid to late thirties, I had a conversation with someone, and we were both commiserating. She was saying, I feel like my whole life has just been one big try.
And I said, well, that's better than it not being a big try, even if it's a fail and it never succeeded the way you wanted it to, the fact that you put that effort out is meaningful in its own right.
And I said, I'm getting close to 40. This was several years ago. I said, I'm getting close to 40. And I realized that I'm making it an objective for myself, making a rule for myself that once I get to 40 years old I've got TO stop pursuing certain dreams that require an outsized energy and effort for a very theoretical or hypothetical return on investment that doesn't seem to be happening if it doesn't, if I don't make it, if I don't get my big break, and I don't get a real sign from the universe that this path that I was on at the time, which was maximal effort and energy at the expense of friendships, relationships, finances, sometimes health and well being, just extreme pursuit of ambitious dreams that were very lofty goals. I was not gonna pursue that, I'm not gonna continue to behave that way after 40, at that point and because I had a vasectomy I don't have dependents I have designed a life of being able to have maximum extended chasing of dreams as a lifestyle.
Broadly speaking, you could just say that as an artist, I made the decision to reproduce culturally, not biologically, if that makes any sense, to dedicate my life to cultural production.
It would be far less respectable and reasonable of me to put as much energy and effort as I have into dreams if I had mouths to feed and shelter to provide and food to put on the table.
I chose this path so that I would have more time to pursue those dreams.
However, I capped it at 40 and said if you're not getting the signs by then, you have to just accept that for your health and for your longevity in order to just take care of your basic needs on going, you've got to just maybe not punch a clock and get a nine to five and sit in traffic for half the day.
Anything but that, but at least get serious about your physical security.
So I had a whole algorithm. I was studying Python coding language at the time, and I was learning how if then statements work in terms of computer programming logic.
And I made a computer program and just a few lines of personal logical code that said, if this final hail mary of a investment, I put a thousand dollars up to hire a PR agency and if that didn't pay for itself in terms of the success of that campaign, I was going to at that point do what I think a book has been written about called Quit, knowing When to Quit.
Because it's not always good advice to tell someone, just keep trying forever.
It's good that you did try, now that you tried, but going continuing that forever, maybe at your peril.
So I did essentially follow that algorithm, and it was to get myself onto the land into a position where, if I start rotting and breaking down, getting diseases like cancer, etc.
Then I would at least have a place to die gracefully on my own terms, and not be anyone else's problem, not be a dependent on anyone else.
I had some health issues that were starting to come out in terms of what one of my health mentors had said many times is starting around 35, all of the bad food that you ate for your whole life, leading up is going to start to lead to just screws coming loose and starting to fall apart all over the place.
And it just gets worse and worse and worse no matter what.
And if you didn't have a very healthy life leading up to that, it's gonna be painful and costly to just maintain a state of being relatively without pain in the face of all kinds of things, starting to just naturally fall apart with aging from that point on.
So that's grim, but it's true, and it's real. And I started to have some minor injuries that were kind of flaring up and just having burned the candle at both ends for so long as an ambitious person, there's things that were compounding.
So I had to say, what am I gonna lose next? What's gonna happen next that's gonna debilitate me, such that I really have to make sure I've got my adulting dialed in, and I've got a place where I can at least rot in peace.
And so I followed that algorithm and I got myself land.
It wasn't all according to a perfect plan and some aspects of it were luck and happenstance.
Now approaching my mid forties, I have spent the first few years of my forties following that algorithm to where I pruned off some dreams, and I focused on adulting in a very private, personal manner.
I got myself a piece of land. I made it into a survival retreat.
I made it so that if I needed to stay there for long periods of time, even indefinitely, I could do so on a very limited budget.
And if I had to go there to fight a disease or die from a disease, and I could do it in a graceful way on my own terms, and not be anyone else's problem, and not be suffering on Skid Row the way that I was when I had that epiphany.
Okay, life's been one big try. You were not met, and you do not have the support or the finances to fight any more ailments that you may accumulate with this extreme lifestyle.
So quit the dream and start really focusing on just basic maintenance of your health and on private property, which is what I've been doing for several years, but this superseding mission, where a higher calling has brought me out of that mode, it is nice to say to myself. Okay, well, and I'm not gonna explain exactly what that is. There will be more details of that forthcoming over time. But the relatable aspect of this mystery that I'm alluding to is that you could be doing the most conservative, prudent and fiscally responsible thing, austerity measures, to be able to start thinking more about just basic health maintenance and not jeopardizing your health by over extending to pursue dreams.
You could be reeling in all of that excess, and be doing a pretty good job of that, and then have, almost, like the effect of having to stand up to a self limiting thought pattern, like fear or the the, idea that you're talking yourself out of your dreams too early. This comedian said I see a lot of people driving cheap cars in front of me on the highway, and that tells me that a lot of people gave up on their dreams.
It's an interesting moment for me to say, I capped that timeline. I said at 40 I'm going to start for real adulting and I'm going to prune off these dreams.
And then this factor, this wild card factor, occurred. Now, I have no other choice.
And I say that with all honesty to myself, I have no other choice but to resume and reboot that creative gamble on behalf of someone else's health in order to raise funds in order to raise awareness, and to try to again maximize efforts that have no guarantee of a return investment.
It's all living on a prayer. The difference now is that I have some means to afford to do that more responsibly, without undermining my health, without undermining my material resource base.
And I have land to operate from. And I have actually resolved some of my own health issues.
So it's not exactly like setting the clock back ten years. I am in my forties, and I am slowing down in certain ways and less willing to pull all nighters and burn the candle at both ends.
However, it is an interesting scenario where, having done what I thought was the right thing, which is to scale back my ambitions and get myself into a more humble existence that I did achieve that.
And unfortunately, what's missing is a very solid, very reliable, steady, even very humble, steady income.
It's still a question mark whether this brand that I'm speaking from right now is going to catch enough support online to where it is able to give me more freedom and more options to pursue other things in addition to just developing this brand, I really hope it does, and hopefully you will be a part of that in some way, shape or form, collaborating or donating or otherwise.
But this end of itself, is a bit of still living on a prayer, but it's a far humbler ambition than what I was doing before.
Now, that less humble ambition, I may eventually start talking about what that is, for now, I'm gonna leave it a bit of a mystery, but the take away here for the context of this show, is that you never know when, after you dispose of a very ambitious dream, that some higher calling forces you back into it, and that you have no choice.
And for me, the psychology of not setting myself up to fail on any level, financially, spiritually, emotionally. I don't wanna exert effort and energy in vain anymore.
That's something that I could definitely gamble on in a younger earlier stage of life.
But I cannot now.
I don't have my whole life ahead of me anymore and I have a lot of unavoidable health decline ahead of me.
That's just called normal, natural aging. No matter how healthy you are going into that or not, you will be forced to deal with that.
So my psychology is, I don't wanna waste energy pursuing anything.
But if something comes along and says, no, you have to gamble energy again.
I'm just glad to say, okay, I'll be able to do so in a far more secure manner on all levels, given the fact that I did take that time out, and I did prioritize walking back from that frail edge or the end of the branch, and walking back on that branch towards the trunk of the tree and really anchoring into that trunk of the tree.
Now, if I have to go back out on that branch, even though I wasn't planning to, and didn't want to, if I'm being forced to rescue someone else, and I'm gonna put myself in danger in the process.
It's safer for both of us, for me to have gone back to the trunk of the tree and put on some what they call lobster claw anchor points.
If you've done any tree climbing where you have a climbing harness and you use webbing and carabiners to create what are approximations of Lobster claws where you are able to create hitches with that webing and those carabiners that are attached to your climbing harness.
That way, your hands are free, and you can free climb, but with a minimum of one anchor point at all times.
As you unclip one, you leave one clipped, and then you, you rotate those along the way up and down a tree.
So if I have those metaphorical lobster claw anchor points in place that I have built over the last several years now, there's far more room to still be prudent and pursue some dreams.
And certainly I will do so in the name of helping someone else, and in the name of being called to do this, not of my own ego, not of my own sort of unrealistic ambitions, but out of necessity.
So if anything, the psychology is, I wouldn't be doing what I'm about to do unless I was forced by a higher calling to do it by a command that is beyond me and that I can know isn't just coming from my frail ego and that is a discipline and a way to live that can be very compatible with different religions or different spiritual paths and it's very pantheistic. Whoever you believe is the the source of what gives you your highest orders will just put it that way, for me, it's very personal. I don't need to explain it much here.
I will just say that there's a grace and a surrender to not having to judge or criticize yourself oh is this all just my own ego or is this, all just my own agenda. Am I going to tempt fate and have something backfire and have only myself to blame?
That is what one of my fears. And one of the things that keeps so called men of action, or people of action, the ones who fall in line to chains of command.
There is definitely a grace in not being the highest ranking officer in the sense that if I'm just following orders, then I'm free to do my best at the mission, at the task at hand, and I don't have to equivocate about, oh, is this the right thing or not?
It's just, no, this is what you're gonna do. And I don't like to take orders from people in that way.
That's why I'm a military of one, as it were, to put it one way.
But I do take orders from higher command structures that are non human, meta visible, if you will.
And that can be a voice, that can be a personality, that can be a deity, or whatever you want it to be, or whatever it is for you, or, like I said before, and I'll wrap on this, it could just be the emergent property of life circumstances.
And if you wanna say that you're being spoken to by some divine being who's creating a set of circumstances, that's your prerogative to interpret things in that way.
I could be totally atheistic and say, my mission now has been superseded by a higher mission that is emerging, a set of circumstances that essentially is a health crisis of someone who I care about, where I don't have the means to support them or help them right now.
And that means taking a gamble with my time and energy to create resources to help them.
I have to play the wild card that I have left, and that wild card is one that I buried, so I'm gonna dig it up and play it.