A new line of work

****,
Good to hear from you, it has been a while since that fire­side chat over at ****‘s place many moons ago.  The short ver­sion of my long, ram­bling, and most­ly about me answer is:  Grab some­thing you think you like by the balls and do it.  If you don’t like it you’ll know pret­ty quick and you’ve got enough time and mon­ey and tal­ent to move on when you need to.

Ok, onto the ram­bling bullshit:

I’m teach­ing for the Navy, small boat han­dling and div­ing.  Good mon­ey, rea­son­able (real­ly, fuck­ing phe­nom­e­nal) time off and a chance to hang around the **** envi­ron­ment with­out get­ting sucked in.  It’s safe and it’s enjoy­able, but after 3 years of it I am ready to move on.  I was­n’t born to live a safe and enjoy­able life, although it’s been both late­ly.  Too lit­tle room for cre­ativ­i­ty and too much of a “box” to be liv­ing in.

So we’re in the same boat in a way, except you’ve got a time­line and I don’t.  The first step is already made for both of us; we’ve decid­ed to move on to some­thing new.

Stuff that I think about for my next activ­i­ty include job sat­is­fac­tion and chal­lenge and cre­ativ­i­ty.  I have a men­tal list I’m slow­ly putting togeth­er that includes work­ing with my hands, solv­ing real prob­lems, work­ing with peo­ple, being out­side, being answer­able to those who per­form at a high­er lev­el than me and who can help bring me up, and bring­ing in a steady enough flow of mon­ey that I can meet my obligations.

Beyond that, I don’t know what to do oth­er than to con­tin­ue to pur­sue clar­i­ty on it and trim away any­thing that does­n’t need to be there and just let it sit until it grows on its own and I cre­ate some­thing awe­some and new and cus­tom to me.  Stuff that has helped in the past has includ­ed trips to hang out with friends like CR, tak­ing a class or a course, going and check­ing out total­ly for­eign things, and read­ing a bunch of new books.

To that end Lee & I are head­ing off to Patag­o­nia for a 16 day trip in Decem­ber.  Maybe that explo­ration will yield results, maybe I’ll meet some­one on the plane, maybe that time away from the Navy job will allow me to release some of those JOB bondages and think up of some­thing new.

CR and I have talked lots about dif­fer­ent jobs or com­pa­nies, and some of the ideas we’ve come up with have sound­ed pretty
awe­some; teach­ing rich peo­ple how to act, or teach­ing rich kids how to act (both of those by sur­round­ing the client with a group of good dudes), or solv­ing funky prob­lems that there are no “experts” for, or build­ing a compound/community where we could be self-reliant and inter­de­pen­dent with folks we dig.

I was talk­ing to a bud­dy of mine, ****, the oth­er day and we thought it would be pret­ty awe­some to start a school for all ages that addressed what seems to be a hunger in this soci­ety for the upbring­ing of men, some­thing that com­bines stuff you find at the ser­vice acad­e­mies with stuff you’d find at a school like Hamp­shire or Ever­green.  Box­ing and Greek lit. in the morn­ing, gar­den­ing and blue col­lar work in the after­noon.  Lots of out­door activ­i­ty and a gen­er­al dis­re­gard for phys­i­cal com­forts, all in the pur­suit of human arete.  A basic and unfash­ion­able uni­form and a desire to instill a pen­chant for hard liv­ing and a thirsty intel­lect in our students.

So while that sim­mers and boils and devel­ops on its own I just bought anoth­er ATM to put into a local restau­rant and that’ll build the income stream by a few hun­dred dol­lars more a month.  It seems that it’s about lots of “dream-time” and an equal amount of “Guns up, let’s do this” activity.

As far as advice on “the out­side”; dude, the sky is the moth­er­fuck­ing lim­it for you.  There is noth­ing out there that does­n’t sat­is­fy the basics of mon­ey and time and the rest of that bull­shit that you can’t pick up in two weeks, it’s whether or not you want to take the ten years to mas­ter it and trade those years for oth­er years when you could be doing some­thing else.

If any of this helps or if you’ve got ques­tions write or call any­time.  Keep think­ing, keep char­gin’, keep read­ing, and if all else fails get under the squat bar or get out on a hard run and just see what kind of push you’ve still got.  Some­times those self-imposed moments of intense phys­i­cal duress cre­ate the fastest and hard­est and hottest cre­ative juice kick you’ll find.

Ok for now,
NFH