The Adventure

The road to success and career fulfillment is not straight, it's not a super highway and it's not without potholes.

Patty Talahongua (Hopi)
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Hello Ambriz, Angola Good fishing.
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Recently someone suggested that since he thought I had had such an interesting and adventuresome life I should write an autobiography. I don't think I will. But one thing I'm sure of is that if I did and a conscientious, researching journalist wrote a biography of me, other than names and dates the two books would not resemble each other. It would be due simply to the fact that an objective appraisal of a human action is usually far from the subjective context of it, which is much richer in meaning. And what I might consider an important thread in my life a biographer may see as trivial, and vice versa.

In my autobiography there would certainly be no mention of certain things I said and did, not because I don't have the courage to write about them but because I would want to be remembered by and identified by the best of my actions and experiences.

There's a Dakota proverb that says "We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.: We can't help leaving tracks in other people's lives, especially on the twisting, potholed road to fulfillment. Some of those tracks can be harsh and hurting. One can hope that things will turn out for the best, amd many will. But there are footprints and crumbs I've left behind me that I would just as soon forget about.

I'm glad I traveled the road I did. It was hard and difficult. I could have chosen not to follow it. One always has the choice of looking for and finding the permanent resting place, the elysian field where dreams remain dreams, where one's potentials are woven into a crazy quilt of maybes that keeps us warm in the winter and where the answer to the question of why didn't I is answered by "I didn't want to take the chance, it was too scary. I may be bored, but I'm not frightened."

I didn't set out to have an adventuresome life, but the choices I made thrust adventures on me, some of them dangerous pot holes. I have had many lonely days and many frightening days, but I haven't had a boring day since I can remember.

So let the biographer write of me as he will, if he really wants to. As for my autobiography it has, for seven decades, today and perhaps forever, consisted of only one word: "vagabond."

DB
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This Week's Contest

This is one I put up a few years ago and people seemed to enjoy it so here it goes again.

You are now ordered to take a famous remark, a cliche or otherwise and restate it in the most verbose manner possible. Example:

Night is an inappropriate time for the manufacture of animal feed.
(Make hay while the sun shines.)

Get it? Ken Riches won this contest the last time, so you're up against some heavy competition.

Good luck. The decision of the ornery, biased, curmudgeon is final.
DB
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SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.

Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

4 answers so far

I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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