Alaniswriting

CELL PHONE ACCOUNTS a pet peeve

2012-01-31T08:19:00.001-08:00

CELL PHONE ACCOUNTS a pet peeve

Is there a make of SMART PHONE: iPhone, Android, etc that can have its sim card changed whenever the owner chooses?

Last Fall I finally bought an inexpensive phone in South Africa, a sim chip and 300 minutes. The phone number was valid for 3 months. I used it for 3 weeks.

In November I was in Singapore for 5 days the beginning of my trip and 4 days at the end of my trip. I walked into the Sng Tel tower near my hotel and bought a Sng Tel chip and got 20 Sing Dollars of minutes for $18 total and used the phone over the 3 week period I was in that part of Southeast Asia.

I left Singapore to spend 12 days in Malaysia in several cities and towns and my client/host/friend bought me a chip from their cell phone company that I easily used in Malaysia for nearly two weeks.

Before I left Malaysia I asked him to switch the Malaysia chip for my Sng Tel chip and I was back in business in Singapore.

Still have the phone.

Next time I travel I will buy a local sim card and some minutes.

Sure is cheaper.

Now how to get this to work in the US with a SMART Phone or simply change my phone paradigm once again and finally let go of my cell phone number and monthly AT&T account and just buy the cheapest sim cards available when I really need to make or receive phone calls.

I am almost ready to do that. I use the internet either thru wifi or through my own Apple Airport connected to the AT&T designated DSL landline now for less than $20 per month whereas my minimum plan AT&T cellphone (450 min/month...I have 3,000+ minutes unused rollover minutes currently) that costs me $50 with all the taxes and service fees.

urgh!

The Evolution of Quotations

2012-01-29T12:17:00.000-08:00

The Evolution of Quotations

a mentor, fellow speaker friend of mine, Merrill Douglass once shared this story about speakers and writers....and their use of quotations.

1st Step....."As 'so and so' said"....actual quote (probably completely out of context).

2nd Step...."As has been said"....generalizing with no credit given in or out of context

3rd Step....."As I have heard said or have read said" no reference or credit given except to yourself

4th Step....."As I have always said."....ego claiming credit for others' thoughts and work as your own

Cre8ng a WOW Day on a Tuesday in January

2012-01-25T05:08:00.000-08:00

Cre8ng a WOW Day on a Tuesday in January

Yesterday I was focusing on the WOW or NEAT stuff I would do because of a Facebook message from a new friend I met early in 2011 at the Florida Creativity Weekend program in Sarasota.

Beautiful weather, spent time shooting pool and talking with a friend for two hours in the afternoon I haven't seen in 10 or more years,

Had a declious Japanese style dinner of sushi, miso soup and a small salad,

went to the local library by mistake looking for a special presentation about Gardens of the world sponsored by both the "Friends of the Botanical Gardens" and the "Friends of the Athens-Clarke County Library" and ended up checking out two fun looking books about Bill Gates and Antonio Gaudi (call me eclectic).

Then I drove to where the lecture was actually being held at the beautiful Botanical Gardens Visitor Center south of Athens, that I had not visited in a few years.

There have been many physical changes at the Visitor Center. One being a new deli-cafe had replaced the wonderful cafe. Because I had some time left before the 7:00 presentation in the large 4 story high glass Conservatory with the giant trees and other rainforest plants I decided to try one of the pastries at the new cafe to top off my sushi dinner.

I chose a piec of pumpkin bread

It truly was the biggest WOW of the day. Delicious tasting and so, so moist.

The presentation was done by a UGA professor of Horticulture....Allan M. Armitage, Ph.D. Horticulturist, Writer, and Traveler.

Obviously a very passionate person, who loves gardens and is a prolific and popular writer about horticulture and gardens.

As to his presentation? He needs to join the Athens Toastmasters Club and take some lessons in slide show design and presentation techniques.

Very personable but it was much like being in his family room watching his summer vacation slides.

His stories were great, not well told though.

The closing 5 minutes was a ppt or keynotes presentation turned into a movie by one of his members of the traveling trip he was discussing.

The Gardens of Ireland.

Overall it was an interesting and fun way to spend about an hour on a Tuesday evening in Athens.

An overall WOW day after all.

Doing Only What is Best For US Can Create WORSE PROBLEMS

2012-01-24T11:02:00.000-08:00

Doing Only What is Best For US Can Create WORSE PROBLEMS

This is my response to the list of SHOULDS, MUSTS, GOT TOS, HAVE TOS...that Mark Sanborn and Sarah Michel posted on their respective Facebook pages.

Mark I generally agree with what you and Sarah Michel have posted yet some will create problems also, especially if followed to extreme...

I had some fun playing with your list. If you have some of that time you have saved doing all of the list suggestions perhaps you will spend 10 minutes to read the following. I am off to post it on my blog. alaniswriting for fun not work with less stress and less worry.

Less TV, more reading
TV is not the problem any more than going to the opera, theater
it is what you choose to watch, why you choose to watch
reading can also be just focused on CRAP TOO.

no TV.....the advertising professionals will suffer, the sellers of products that make TV watching relatively inexpenisve will suffer, the cable companies will suffer, the manufacturers of televsions and the merchandisers will suffer and so will all of the employees of each of these places of employment

Less shopping, more outdoors
agree...I do....
less shopping means an economy that will never succeed in the next couple lifetimes or generations.

Less clutter, more space
agreed...and I continue to work on removing what has caused memories to become clutter and junk in my 67 1/2 years of living

people will buy smaller homes or stay in their present homes or apts and kill the housing market, architectural profession, contruction industry, material suppliers, real estate people, government inspecctors....etc.

Less rush, more slowness
totally agree

Can't think of any downsides to this one.

Less consuming, more creating
I have been living by this one since 1998

the economy will only get worse. It is based on CONSUMPTION of mostly things we really do not need or truly benefit from.

Creating everything?...will simplify lives and destory many different industries that do create things through mass production to make them reasonably priced for the typical person to buy versus how much they would cost to CREATE on our own with our meager skills.

Less junk, more real food
totally agree and have practised this one for 30 years except for the occasional dish of ice cream with chocolate chip or chips from candy bars topping.

just think of all the JUNK FOOD producers, distributors, sales people, discounters, wholesalers who will go out of business...

Coca Cola, Pepsi gone.
Beer companies gone,
candy companies gone.
Fast Food restaurants gone.
Convenience stores gone. Vending machine companies gone.

Less busywork, more impact
once again I agree

Yet if bosses, managers, leaders, supervisors, clients, patients, customers stopped causing all the BUSYWORK....many people would get laid off because they no longer would be needed.

Less driving, more walking
this one I also follow along with using public transportation wherever I travel around the globe.

Yet this would destroy the auto industry and all the vendors, car dealers, advertising people, etc.

Less noise, more solitude
I have followed this for years

Yet the entertainment industry, tv, radio, dvd, cd, iPod, iPad and so many other products, companies and industries would be hurt by this

Less focus on the future, more on the present
I tend to do this the older and older I get because the amount of potential future ahead of me continues to become less and less

Planning keeps Day Planner and organizer companies in business along with organizing software, Blackberries, iPod Touch, iPads, Anroids and other such high tech devices.

Less work, more play
totally agree...I have live by this axiom since my late wife died

yet my income has dropped causing me to do many of the other things and caused me to refocus most aspects of my life and follow many of the other suggestions in this list.

Less worry, more smiles
totally agree

unfortunagely this would impact social workers, counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Breathe versus less breathing?
just playing with this one...

Definitely BREATHE

The NEW GroupThink...article

2012-01-17T13:12:00.001-08:00

The NEW GroupThink...article

if you have followed my Facebook messages the last 30 minutes I have been criticizing points made in the article a student shared with me recently and I have reading word for word this afternoon.

here is another quote....this one I have been sharing from my years of education (BS in Architecture, MA in Interior Architecture combined with MEd in Guidance and Counseling of Gifted, Talented and Creative Individuals plus a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology studying how to teach creative thinking skills to individuals and groups or teams)

Sorry about the self-promotional bragging. I shared it to compare against the author who has written an essay/articles using individual puzzle pieces (quotes out of context from supposed research studies) to create the finished puzzle she calls her essay. Looks interesting but fairly shallow and often in correct in its claims.

Here is the quote that I believe most people will agree with.

"But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. "

that is a valid generalization but not completely accurate about the reality of workplaces throughout the US or the World.

Where is my autographed copy of your NEXT BOOK?

2012-01-16T02:41:00.000-08:00

Where is my autographed copy of your NEXT BOOK?

The following is my "email" answer to that question when a friend in South Africa asked it.

PS: when can I get a signed copy of your "next book" :):):) i.e. when is your next book coming out? everyone loves your first one:)

Read the following with a cup of tea or glass of wine if you choose to take the time and it might explain why I have not completed more published books. These vignettes of stories are only snippets of what I have done or gone through since 1995 when BROKEN CRAYONS was first published.

You can see copies of some of my completed books at this webpage on my website...

http://www.cre8ng.com/articles-experiment/products

BTW the following VERY long email (almost a short book...

is not the complete story either....

Since Broken Crayons was first published in 1995 I have written a couple books, and made them electronic books, not e-books like e-readers take, simply books in pdfs or MS Word.

Also I have co-written or written chapters for a mix of other books with colleauges: Kobus Neethling, Kanes Rajah, Kirpal Singh, Lee Silber (actually he used some of my stories in his book on Organization for the Right Brainer) plus I was one of 10 authors who published a series of 3 little ideas books that a speaker colleague and his wife published for us.

As to NEW books, there are a variety that are not finished.

Mainly because I still have not truly leanred the right software or how to use the software I do have already to publish books.

What I have written and created have been many, many workbooks for my programs ranging for 10 to 130 pages in length.

On top of that I have been writing chapters and sections for a mix of books about my traveling and my memoirs, hopefully for publication but mostly for my children and/or my grandchildren to some day read.

a mix of the above are available on my website in pdf files.

Here is the history of my book authoring from before Broken Crayons.

In 1980 or 1981 I wrote and self published (at Kinko's) three books: (see photo above)

We Are...?! which is about my MIND Design thinking style model

Ooops! a books about my creative thinking model inspired by the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process after I started presenting at CPSI annual from 1978 onward until 2007 (30 years in a row) and last year once since.

144 Ways to Increase Creativity in Your Workplace

In 1986 when I was asked to become Vice President and Managing Director of a company called: The DISC System, Inc. It consisted of 3 partners who had the tests, who provided minimal money, the occaisional services of one of the partners' secretaries to do the clean up word processing of what I wrote for their MANUAL and a dozen or so consultants who we certified to use our materials. Titles are definitely misleading.

The DISC System, Inc. was mostly just me part time trying to get the company going.

(many stories that I will leave out)

That manual was my first book that got PUBLISHED, that is loosely using the term.

I was contacted by a sales person from Kendall-Hunt, a well-known publisher in the US asking if I had a book I wanted to get published. He was selling their services as a printing and publishing company to speakers and consultants who were interested in self-publishing or contract publishing. They were aiming at those of us who didn't want to go through the BIG NAME PUBLISHER process or PUBLISHING AGENT process.

I had been doing various length workshops using the title and premises behind BROKEN CRAYONS that I had developed since I started in 1980 with my first workshop with that title. He contacted me in either October or November. We signed the contract for them to publish a run of 1,000 (they were published larger runs) and I agreed to pay them $7,000 either through the sales over a 2 year period or in cash or the difference in cash at the end of the 2 year period. I gambled that I could sell enough at $16.95 or $15,00 discount or even $10 each to pay the $7,000. My goal was to sell the first 1,000 and then find an agent to sell it to a BIG HOUSE printer or for me to sell the book directly to a BIG HOUSE publisher.

I will leave out the next two year's stories, because it would fill up a book.

At the end of the 2 years I became the publisher and have had to more printings done of the 2 edition (only a few minor revisions and the inclusion of MIND Design as part of the contents of the book instead of just being BLOWN in during the production of the book.

Since I first completed writing and having Broken Crayons published by K

endall Hunt in 1995 there have been 2 editions and 3 printings in the US.

It was published in Turkey in Turkish, It was translated by a colleague, a professor of gifted education I had first met in Indianapolis, Indiana at an international creativity conference of an international oreativity organizations that was known as ICINC in 1998. In 1999 when I was going to be part of another Turkish colleage's (a CPSI colleague) first creativity conference in Istanbul I talked her into attending it and then talked the founder into inviting her to present at 3 or 4 of his next conferences between 2000 and 2005. Esra Aslan, her name, translated BROKEN CRAYONS into Turkish and found a publisher that she had me meet to complete the publishing agreement.

It was then published in Solvenia in Solenian (I believe that is the language). My host there when I was in Slovenia in 2003 during my first trip around the globe is the one who got it translated and published in 2003 or 2004.

Then in 2003 my Japanese host in Osaka in 2003 had it translated and asked that I turn it into a graphic book, like Japanese Manza novels....all cartoons. When I returned to Japan in 2004 I had sent him several examples of cartoons for the body and to be integrated with the text. That wasn't what he wanted. Then he decided not to published saying, "It's too American."

Finally in I believe 2005 or 2006, Francois Coetzie from Midrand or Centurian (haven't figured out which of those he has lived in, even when I stayed with him during 3 trips to SA before or after ACRE) found a printer and published the South African edition that we sold at ACRE 3 years until he ran out of copies.

I can't remember which year Kobus contacted me to co-author UNCOVERING CREATIVITY with him and Rache. It was suppose to be a DUMMIES book. Over the next year to 18 months there are many stories we went through until Kobus finally decided that WE would self-publish it like he often does with his books (70 or 80 so far).

In 2006 or 2007 Kanes asked several CPSI/Creatiivity colleagues to write individual chapters for a pair of books he was editing.

Since then I have been approached by a variety of editors to include a chapter I have written inside their books.

I have been involved with a few others.

For a BIG NAME publisher in the US several years ago I did two 3-ring binder books with my late friend and mulitple published book friend, Arthur van Gundy, who was the editor of them that were EXERCISE books for creativity exercises.

Also for several years I one or two of my exercises I have created have been included in a highly successful training exercise book series that is published annually.

Finally since 1997 when I started attending an evening adult learning course through the Continuing Education Center here at the University of Georgia titled:

MURDER AND MAYHEM FOR MONEY - (8 week, one night a week mystery writing class)

and attending several creative writing classes taught by the same woman and now long-time friend

I have started 7 different mystery novels, created the main character, the basic structure or premises for the plot line of a series of books that take place in several countries around the world. The main character is a glorified version of me who wanders the world to teach creative thinking and ends up solving mysteries in each of the countries while he is there.

2 of them I completed first rough drafts. The other 5 I have only written a few chapters sporadically.

Since the Fall of 2001 after I returned from South Africa for the 4th time and had completed my first trip completely around the world in a single trip I began writing a book about that trip titled:

LIFE IS A CREATIVE JOURNEY,

NOT A GUIDED TOUR

I have written drafts of many chapters, some over and over since 2001. Actually from January of 2002 until March or April in between taking two weekend workshops on writing books I wrote over 150,000 words of a first draft of that book.

When I sat down and tried to write the BOOK PROPOSAL I realized that I hated what it had become (a self-help book using the motif, metaphor, theme or backdrop of traveling) and didn't not see a real market for it.

I put it aside for almost a year.

Since then I have written several other pieces for it that are more like what I really want it to be. That is along the line of many different personal travel of adventure books I have collected and read over the last 30 to 40 years.

After starting to read EAT PRAY LOVE but stopping about 40% into it because I saw it too much a love and sex failure book and put it aside I went to see the Julia Roberts movie and went back and started reading the entire book over again and finished it completely during the next 7 days when I went back to see the movie completely a second time because I had missed the first 10 to 15 minutes the first time the weekend before.

That book plus listening to Elizabeth Gilbert talk about her writing on a TED talk and some interviews inspired me to relook at my life of traveling to create either one book broken into sections like she did, in her case representing 3 sections of her 1 year long adventure based on the themes she discovered after returning home.

I then looked at my childhood Family Summer trips from 1950 to 1962 as one.

My 3 month long backpacking and Euro-Rail Pass trip in 1977

Merry and I's 5 week trip completely around the UK and short time in France

1982 the Summer Merry, Jessica and I spent in Europe when I taught in UGA's Cortona, Italy Travel Abroad Program (Cortona is the city where Under the Tuscan sun book is about and the movie was mostly filmed).

2001 first trip around the world

2003 second, third, fourth trips around the world from 84 days to 25 days to 9 days

My ongoing traveling internationally ever since...

Hopefully by now you have finished your wonderful cup of tea or glass of wine or two or three cups or glasses and now have a sense of why I have not published 70 or 80 new books since BROKEN CRAYONS was first published in 1995.

main causes or factors I haven't include....

not willing to go in debt or to spend large amounts of money and gamble again

frustration from all the failures or incompleted attempts

lack of continual motivation on any single book for long enough

not willing to fill up more of my house with unsold copies of many books

not willing to spend money to pay people to publish, distribute, sell, store my books

Seeing Lee Silber's website again yesterday has motivated me more to finally this year in 2012 to learn how to create finished looking, high professional quality ebooks to sell through my website through a shopping cart.

Thanks for asking and your interest in having an autographed copy of my NEW BOOK.

Alan

I'm So 1980s, almost

2012-01-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

I'm so 1980s, almost.

I am now using/have my...

12th Apple computer, 4th laptop (1400, G3, G4 now G5 MacBookPro.
7th or 8th cell phone....the first 7 were gifts from my daughter who has worked in the mobile to cell phone industry since she was a college senior in 1994.
first, I PAID FOR IT, cell phone account. Jessica had provided free basic service thru her job for 14 or so years.
a mid-size iPod
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, internet (old man that I am), Mac Mail, Yahoo.com (you helped me in 2001 set up my first Yahoo.com group), Gmail, blogs again (have set up 8 or more of them, mostly dormant the past couple years)
Twitter, check it rarely now because most messages I receive are of no interest or just crap
smugmug until I can find a better way to store and share photos creatively
website, now using a WordPress template designed for me by a IT friend who works at UGA

thinking about buying....iPad or other ereader

money is tight, no debts, just smaller amount of revenue....spending $600 is something I hold back from
an ereader of some type....the $200 to $300 to get the type I would prefer with WIFI
looked an iPod TOUCH over the weekend, $200 to $300 and wifi

may eliminate my cell phone if I buy the iPod touch and eliminate the $50/month bill or $600 year cost, not sure that the reliability and longevity of an iPod Touch is good enough yet.

Used a "throwaway" phone in South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia this Fall buying individual SIM chips and enough minutes to last me for 1, 2 or 3 weeks of use.

I am so 1980s with some 2010s dreams.

Ha ha

PS Almost I have begun writing much longer messages again on Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook....probably chasing the readers, followers, friends, contacts way who now prefer 140 characters or less.

2011-12-12T20:09:00.000-08:00

Sitting here months since my last blog message on this blog.

Having traveled in Malaysia twice, Florida twice, parts of Georgia, from the Toronto Airport northward to Cedar Glen Y-Camp, Griffin, Georgia, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Singapore and Malaysia for two weeks the second time I am looking forward to where my traveling will take in 2012.

Best wishe for a Merry Christmas.

Visit my website to see and read my 2011 Holidays card about my 12 months in 2011.

Alan

2010-08-19T15:57:00.000-07:00

In 1977 I went on my first extended international journey. I had applied a few times for the Architectural Rome Prize as a young architect and then as an experienced, licensed architect. I never won a prize or even placed.

In 1977 I chose to take myself on my own Rome Prize. I planned a 100 day journey that would take me to all the European Countries and all the countries of the UK and hopefully into a few of the Eastern Block countries.

About a month from leaving a friend, a graphic designer called me and said why don't we travel together for the first week or two together until we get used to being in Europe. David (Kwok-Yee) and Mindy Wong were going on a 45 day trip to western Europe with most of their time to be spent in Spain. I was going to begin in Luxemborg and to travel counterclockwise around Europe eventually ending up in Paris from where I would fly home in September after being in 23 or 24 countries.

David clinched the deal when he told me he had learned about a special, only every 10 year, graphics festival to be held in Dusseldorf. He sold me.

What journeys preceded yours?

2009-12-05T08:13:00.001-08:00

What journeys preceded yours?

What journeys did your parents, grandparents, great grandparents take so that you might take the ones you have taken?

My material grandfather walked many miles to find work when he was a young man to Kirkcaldy, Scotland. There he met my maternal grand mother. Together the had 9 children, 5 girls and 4 boys.

My paternal grandparents were decendents of people from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. They started their family in Blythe, England. My grandfather worked on ships as had his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather. His father, my great grandfather owned his own ship. My grandfather worked mostly as a mechanic, engineer, a general repairman on ships.

My mother left Scotland to come to the United States. My father left England to come to the United States. Both lived in a couple places before coming to Detroit, Michigan where they met, fell in love, married and started their family of three sons. Me, I was the youngest.

Each generation has been preceded by the journeys of other generations. Each of their trips have had impact or could very easily have impact on the travels of the following and future generations.

What about your families and their journeys?

Did they travel across their villages, towns, cities, states, country on their journeys that preceded yours?

Take some time and jot down some notes of the types of journeys they may have taken. Don’t consider whether their individual journeys might have affected your life travel. Just list them. You can examine them for clues and patterns later.

List all the relatives you can.
Where were they born?
Where were they educated?
What kinds of schools did they go to?
Did they finish school?
How high did they go? HS, College, Technical School, Masters, Doctorate?
What type of work journeys did they take?
Occupations
Jobs
Careers

What types of travelers were they?
Did they travel within a limited range or distance?
Did they travel a great deal?
Did they travel for their livings?
Did they travel over seas?
Did they live in different towns, cities, states, countries?

Did they take later dreams that helped fulfill lost or dead dreams?

I just watched the movie, The Rookie. It is about a man in his early to middle 30s who had tried out as a professional baseball pitcher but was hurt in the first year and had to give up his dream. 8 to 10 years later while teaching high school science and coaching the school’s baseball team he challenges the players to chase a dream, winning the state championship, or at least get into the regional championship. They in turn challenge him to try out once again if they do win.

In the movie they do win, they win 16 games after 3 or 4 years of winning only 1 game each year. The players then turned to their coach and say “Now it’s your turn coach!” After much thought and anxiety he does and he is picked up by a farm club, where he is the old man. The old man who can throw a pitch at 98 miles an hour over and over. He plays most of the summer with the team making very little money. Back home his wife and 3 kids are going into debt more and more each week. With two weeks left he wants to quit and come home. He had come close but still didn’t reach his true dream. She convinces him to hang in two more weeks. He does and is brought up to the majors where is successful at achieving his dream, pitching in the major leagues. As the movie credits start the last line on the screen says Jimmy Morris did pitch and he pitched for two sessions before retiring.

He had completed his dream journey.

Have any of your relatives completed such dream journeys?

Have you? Do you have any yet to travel?

Most family histories have such stories. Perhaps not worthy of blockbuster movie plots yet still worthy of making a difference in your life.

Because so many people before me took their life journeys I have been able to take mine.

One of my observations and learnings is that there were many other journeys I might have taken had I thought or felt different at particular times in my life. More confidence, less self-doubt, more belief in myself, less laziness, more work and so many journeys might have been taken.

Yet knowing that I can’t have done something different because I have done what I did already. “If only” is a nice game of fantasy to play. If the “If only’s” can not be still done then spending time and mental energy on them may be either a waste of time or detrimental to you today and in your future.

We are where we are, where we stand or sit. We can’t have been somewhere else. We can move. We can leave. We can work at changing our lives.

I believe the first step is accepting the life we have led. Then focus on the good to great to absolutely fantastic trips we have taken. Enjoy those. Relish those. Then examine what other trips we might take.

If you were to go back to school might you be able to prepare for other journeys? New career? New job? A brighter future? More fun? More excitement?

Where and how might you go back to school now?

Thanks to technology: world wide web, the internet, computers, CDs or DVDs we can access so many more ways to obtain an education from technical to college degrees. With distance learning and many other forms of life long learning available to us now we can nearly live anywhere and still complete our educations.

We might even work completely from our homes today.

Thanks to technology we can travel virtually to nearly any place on earth and in time without leaving our homes.

Wandering the World in Search of Creativity

2009-12-05T08:12:00.002-08:00

Wandering the World in Search of Creativity

For 73 days this summer I wandered completely around the world in search of creative thinking, creativity and creative people, while challenging myself to be creative every day. What started out as simply a dream trip to fulfill a fantasy of a life-time: travel around the world like Philleas T. Boggs did in Around the World in Eighty Days; became partially a research project.

My initial attempts at preparing this article for this edition of Creativity’s Global Correspondents 2002 were more like Alan’s attempts at out writing Bill Bryson and Rick Steve, both excellent travel authors or Charles Kuralt and Peter Jenkins, both excellent authors of the human experience based on their travels throughout the world. To read that I invite you to visit my wanderings journal website: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alan2001. The following is based on learnings and relearnings based on my 73 days of wanderings this summer.

S.P.R.E.A.D.ng Creative Thinking
Since 1976 I have focused much to most of my efforts (personally and professionally) on the application and development of creativity: mine and others. Over the 26 years, professionally, I have slowly refined my focus to S.P.R.E.A.D.ng™ creative thinking throughout workplaces. S.P.R.E.A.D.ng ™ is the acronym I use to demonstrate to people what I believe needs to be done within workplaces to enhance, expand and enrich the creative thinking of all employees (SUPPORT, PROMOTE, RECOGNIZE, ENCOURAGE, APPLY and DEVELOP).

Overall Approach to My Wanderings
During my 73 days traveling around the world the summer of 2001, through New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, Dubai, Turkey, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, England and France; I sought to find examples of creativity everywhere I went and to interview people about their own creativity and creativity in general in their country.

Structure of My Post Review of My Wanderings
As a skeleton structure for this article I have chosen to use two lists of traits of creative people. The first list comes from the TTCT™ (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) and the second comes from an on-going project I have been working on since I was a doctoral student studying with Paul Torrance in 1980. The 20 traits from the TTCT™ represent 20 traits that are examined by the TTCT™ tests based on over 40 years of E. Paul Torrance's scientific study with subjects around the world. The 32 traits from my, "Are You a Crayon Breaker?" exercise, come from a survey study I did of articles on the traits of creative people written from 1950 to 1980. I have used the survey as part of over 2100 professional speeches and workshops since 1981 to suggest the existence of creative thinking potential in all people and also to indicate different styles of creative thinking.

The Initial Process
During my trip I often had people I met and interviewed complete the 32 traits survey to share which they believed fit them. While we talked together I introduced them to the work and ideas of E. Paul Torrance and the 20 traits from the TTCT ™. In addition as a post trip survey I have reviewed my daily journal notes using both the list of 20 from the TTCT™ and my 32 "Crayon Breaker" exercise traits for potential understandings of what I experienced and discovered.

The Traits

TTCT™ Traits

1. Fluency - many ideas
2. Flexibility - different types of ideas
3. Elaboration - addition of details
4. Originality - uniqueness
5. Abstractness of approach moving from reality
6. Openness-resisting early closure or completion
7. Change of Context (cross-interpretation)
8. Combination of Ideas/Facts - synthesis
9. Breakthrough from Current Limits
10. Unusual Viewpoint
11. Internal Perspective
12. Humorous Perspective
13. Richness & Colorful Detail
14. Feelings & Emotions
15. Fantasy
16. Movement & Sound - sense change
17. Multiple Idea Combinations
18. Macro Scale Perspective - seeing from larger view
19. Provocative Viewpoint
20. Future orientation

Are You’re a Crayon Breaker™

1. sensitive
2. not motivated by money
3. sense of destiny
4. adaptable
5. tolerant of ambiguity
6. observant
7. perceive world differently
8. see possibilities
9. question asker
10. can synthesize correctly often intuitively
11. able to fantacise
12. flexible
13. fluent
14. imaginative
15. intuitive
16. original
17. ingenious
18. energetic
19. sense of humor
20. self-actualizing
21. self-disciplined
22. self-knowledgeable
23. specific interests
24. divergent thinker
25. curious
26. open-ended
27. independent
28. severely critical
29. non-conforming
30. confident
31. risk taker
32. Persistent

The Beginning of My Creative Wanderings

From 3:30 pm in Athens, Georgia on June 25th to 5:30 am in Auckland and finally 11:00 am June 27th in Christchurch I began my first trip around the world.

After I arrived in New Zealand: in Christchurch, on the train to Dunedin, in Wellington and in Auckland I asked architects, designers, advertising art directors and account executives, landscape architects and theater people I met and/or stayed with to complete my “Crayon Breaker” survey.

Discovery
Initially I discovered that the lowest number of traits checked off by the people was 15 with a few marking all 32, including #28, severely critical.
Over the 20+ years I have been using the exercise the people in my programs or audiences have generally marked between 5 and 15 with a few, most times, who mark over 15.

Severely Critical as a Trait

Most people usually do not openly admit to this trait in themselves in public. It is the one trait I discover in personal interviews and reviews of biographies and autobiographies of highly creative people, living and dead. My assessment is that the “higher” creative people are severely critical of 3 things and are accused on being severely critical of a 4th. They tend to be severely critical of 1) themselves, 2) their work, 3) the potential of their fields of passion. Because of these three people who are much less creative as them see the “higher” creatives as being severely critical of other people. My experiences and on-going study does not support that anywhere in the 53 countries I have traveled in during my life.

Deliberately Developing Creative Thinking in New Zealand companies
During my interviews in New Zealand after the 32 traits survey was completed and reviewed, I discussed the TTCT ™ traits as trainable/learnable traits, asking the people who were company owners or managers, if they actually, consciously, strived to increase the creative thinking abilities and skills of their people. Except in a few isolated cases where the interviewees were creative thinking consultants the answer was always no and generally the people were unaware that creative thinking could be increased or taught.

Australia Clockwise from Sydney to Brisbane
My four-week journey around Australia (6 states and 2 territories) took me to Sydney, Canberra, small towns and a self-sufficiency site on a mountain in the Snowy Mountains, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Uluru, Alice Springs, Perth, Darwin and a couple small towns in the Northern Territory, Cairns and finally Brisbane.

My Australian and New Zealand Hosts Were Chosen as Subjects Too
In most of the cities and towns I stayed with SERVAS members, an international travel organization who’s members open their homes to other members as their guests. Using the SERVAS Australia directory as I had in New Zealand I hand selected a mix of creative people to stay with in each city with no repeats of professions or occupations. They consisted of creative thinking consultants, designers, theatre promoters/directors, therapists, ceramic artists, counselors, writers, fabric artists, sculptors and teachers or trainers.

Researcher Becomes Searcher
As my trip continued I became less systematic with my data collection primarily because I became much more involved in getting to know my hosts and the people I met along the way instead of playing scientific researcher and also I become more involved in simply the various experiences day by day.

Study continues in Australia
Periodically in Australia I had people complete the “Crayon Breaker” survey The results were the same: very high numbers of traits selected. I continued my sharing information about E. Paul Torrance’s work and some about my own and other creative thinking consultants I have gotten to know from various countries and ones I got to meet along the way during the journey.

A Primary Creative Learning: Dealing with Daily Frustrations
One learning that kept coming back again and again throughout my trip was one I learned from Joel Goodman from the Humor Project many years ago: “If when something happens you can say ‘some day I’ll laugh about this’ then why not start now!” When frustrating and highly stress producing or simply very negative things happened during my travels around Australia and then in other countries later I would “step out of my shoes, boots or saddles” and remind myself of Joel’s bit of wisdom and within a few moments I was smiling and laughing and making notes of how to turn the experience or situation into material for a future article or speech.

Learning from the Weather
Have you ever thought that it takes more creativeness
to enjoy a rainy day than a sunny one?

Instead of becoming frustrated by the many days of rain I experienced in the southern states and territories of Australia I chose to use my creativeness to turn them into wandering adventures.

One example would be my third day in Sydney. It had rained off and on, mostly on, for the entire three days making it difficult to capture the beautiful sites and experiences with my point and shoot Fuji camera. That day after the first couple of hours of riding one harbour boat after another, there are a series of boat lines that crisscross Sydney Harbour from one end to the other, I noticed that the streets were becoming extremely crowded of people. All the while it began raining harder and harder.

Most of my life I have experienced claustraphobic like reactions in crowds of people, especially when the people all seem to have gotten up that morning with the sole intention of getting in my way. That day by noon it had gotten worse and worse. I felt like a young chicken stuffed into an extremely wet and overly crowded chicken growing house with chickens all around and over me, so packed in a can of sardines would seem vastly loose.

I pushed my way through the crowd and found a train station under one of the high-rise blocks of buildings. On the spot I had decided to go out to the 2000 Olympic Site just to get away from the mobs of people. As I pushed my way through I asked person after person how to get to the Olympic Site. After seven or eight different answers I just got on a train heading out of town and asked the conductor once I sat down. My luck was with me. The train I had run onto was the right one.

In about 20 mintues I was walking in the vast, very, very open area of the Olympic Site enjoying the environment and architecture. One person per 20 acres instead of the thousands per 200 square feet I had just left behind in Sydney. After enjoying the openness and viewing many of the contemporary sports arenas I realized that the only building, way off in the distance, almost to the horizon, that was open had a very long line wrapping nearly around it. So I decided to head back to Sydney to catch the bus from downtown Sydney, near the Opera House, to my creative thinking consultant friends’ home in the northern suburbs and end my day of wandering in Sydney.

I slowly walked back to the empty train station. There was a good reason it was empty. The last train back to Sydney that evening was leaving in 3 mintues.

Learning: Trust Your Subconscious
Once again my subconsicous or intuition had taken control and I had unknowingly trusted it to guide me.

That was another learning/re-learning I discovered as I traveled throughout the journey: trust my subsconscious and intuitive skills.

Learning: Trusting Some Natural Creative Traits
In Hobart, Tasmania, while staying with Helen and Andre, two very successful and accomplished ceramic artists , I experienced the value of trusting the natural creative traits of curiosity, exploration, divergence, openness to premature closure, independence, imagination and others. Because I was trying to experience something of each of the 8 states and territories all within 4 weeks I had only planned to be in Hobart and Tasmania 3 days and 2 nights.

Tasmania is an absolutely beautiful island state, which until this summer I mistakenly had thought it was a separate nation. By only planning to be there for such a short time I was not going to see or experience much of the natural beauty of the island on the ground: the vast forests, valleys, rivers, mountains, snowy peaks, etc. Add to that it was raining most of the time as well.

So I played tourist and gathered up maps, went to the Chamber of Commerce plus the Tasmanian Tourist Agency offices to pick up information of what I might see in less than 48 hours by bus (commercial or tour), bicycle or foot.

After a couple hours of frustration of trying to make my time work I simply decided to enjoy Hobart by foot and plan on returning to Tasmania in the future for a much longer time. I was scheduled to speak in the afternoon on adding creative thinking to your life and I wasn’t using my own.

I threw away all but a simple street map of the downtown area of Hobart and began to “wander”. It became another “re-learning”—allow yourself to creatively experience life instead of always trying to create it. That day and the next 1/2 day became fantastic. I experienced many people, the streets of Hobart, the interiors of many shops, restaurants, much urban art and toured several artist studios enjoying a great variety of art.

“Letting go and experience the creativeness and creativity that surrounds you”, became a creative tool throughout the remainder of my 73-Wandering Journey because of my time Hobart.

Learning: Wandering Without a Predetermined Plan
A learning that I often share with participants and students is that of simply “wandering” and letting the creativity that surrounds them remove the “clouds” or blocks of creativity that prevent them from being creative at any given moment. This I did in shops, malls, streets, banks watching the customers, waiting around ATM machines, in ceramic, painting, fabric, sculpture studios, toy stores, grocery stores, along piers, in restaurants.

Wandering: My Greatest Creative Tool
After Hobart it was Adelaide, Uluru (Ayers Rock, Alice Springs, Indian-Pacific train across from Adelaide to Perth, flights to Darwin, Cairns and Brisbane. The experiences and lessons during those 3 weeks continued to reinforce what I had already lived.

Learning: Experiencing Varied and Many Cultures to Expand Creativeness
By the time I reached Brisbane, my last destination in Australia, located in Queensland, I had already experienced many cultures and sub-cultures. That was one of my earliest creative learnings from 1977 when I first took an extended trip involving visiting 20+ countries in Europe, Eastern Europe and North Africa. Learning: to expand and enrich our creativeness and creative thinking skills we need only expose ourselves to varied cultures and peoples.

From Athens, Georgia on June 25th until August 8th in Brisbane I had experienced New Zealanders, natives and immigrants, from the very northern part of the North island to the southern section of the South Island, Maori natives who live in a variety of ways from very old custom to very cotemporary. I had traveled thousands of miles by train, bus, cab, foot and plane experiencing Australians from all eight states and territories: New South Walves, Victoria, Canberra, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. They ranged from very contemporary residents of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. Throw in hedonistis who enjoy their lives in Darwin, Cairns or along the Gold Coast between Cairns and Brisbane, some making their livings as scuba diving instructors or street artists. Also they included self-sufficiency living people from the Snowny Mountains who work only when the money runs out plus country people from each of the 8 areas. Add to that were outbackers who spend days and weeks totally alone in the barren outback. Plus include a mix of Aborigines from those who live as their forefathers and mothers have lived from 40,000 years to college educated professionals who had been trained by both their native cultures and the white culture of modern Australia.

Varied Traits Provoked Through Culutral Immersion
The learnings from such immersion in varied cultures help to expand, enrich and provoke increased creativeness through the following traits:

Abstractness of approach moving from reality—seen through the art and thinking of so many different peoples.

Adaptable—experiencing how so many different Australians live their lives.

Breakthrough from Current Limits—caused by the contrast of my culture with so many others.

Change of Context (cross-interpretation)—continually exposing my self to daily to by the hour changes of context and culture.

Combination of Ideas/Facts (synthesis)—trying to create a synthesis of everything I was learning and experiencing.

Synthesize correctly often intuitively—trusting these abilities in myself by the hour and day.

Curiousity—pushing this to extreme limits everywhere I went whether flying by helicopter to the top of a glacier in Franz Joseph, New Zealand or a seaplane over the skyline of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia or walking around the famous Uluru Rock.

Divergent thinking—being open to experiencing this everywhere I went.

Open-endedness—reminding myself no to go to premature closure quickly

Elaboration - learning to see through the eyes of others

Fantasy—trying to experience the fantasy lives of other cultures

Multiple orientations: past, present, future, virtual

Internal Perspective-trying to experience these in others and myself

Question asker-being willing to ask and be asked

Richness & Colorful Detail-experience vast varieties everywhere I went

Risk taker-opening myself to risk taking daily or by the hour.

See possibilities-opening myself to possibilities everywhere.

Unusual & Provocative Viewpoints-opening myself to these everywhere.

Changing Cultures

During the first six weeks I traveled where English, at least some version of English, was spoken wherever I was.

When I left Brisbane for Kuala Lumpur I left that security blanket behind me at least part of the time each day.

The Physical Environment and It’s Creativity
Kuala Lumpur and Singapore have much in common. Both have worked very hard to enter the 20th and 21st centuries in less than 40 years each. Both skylines are filled with the most contemporary buildings any architect could dream of. Each of the major cities I had been in so far in New Zealand and Australia also were filled with many relatively new buildings, with Brisbane having the largest concentration, mostly built in the 1990s and Sydney slightly behind it because of it hosting the 2000 Olympics.

What Kuala Lumpur and Singapore still possess that neither New Zealand nor Australia do not is also the ancient. NZ and Australia are barely 200 years old. Both KL and Singapore are also ancient countries filled with temples, shrines, and slums, by today’s standards, that use construction types and living styles that people have lived for over 3,000 years.

Learnings: Western Creative Meets Eastern Creativity
The learnings for me as an outsider with little to no knowledge of the many cultures that have lived and died in Malaysia and Singapore were that of watching the contrasts which produce the richness along with the vast confusion and stress that appear to exists in both of these cultures.

Seeing the simple lines, colors and forms of the newest contemporary buildings and developments contrasted against the extremely complex, ornately detailed and poly-colored Hindu temples caused me to recognize the need for juxtapositioning of our thinking.

Onto Sri Lanka to Learn More: Creativity During Revolution
From Singapore after about 10 days spent traveling back and forth between KL and Singapore off I went to rebel torn Sri Lanka, the paradise that has drawn many people from around the world. Less than two weeks before I arrived, rebel forces blew up 5 commercial airplanes on the runways at the airport. I was traveling to Colombo, Sri Lanka with the purpose of presenting professional programs on creative thinking in their workplaces and touring a little.

From my arrival at 12:30 am to be picked up by a total stranger to be driven through totally dark streets to a hotel, that I only knew was located somewhere in Colombo, the capital city where I would sleep and finally meet my formally unmet client in the morning, I needed to use my creative skills to learn to accept and let go of my growing fears.

Learning: Our Cultures as Blocks to Our Creativity
The greatest learning for me among many from my 4 days and 3 nights in Sri Lanka was the power of blocks upon the creativity of a complete culture of people. With all the road blocks, checkpoints, military personnel, nightly curfews, daily required power outages; I saw creativity everywhere I went from how to drive effectively in a non-geometric fashion to get from point a to point b through absolute chaos without traffic lights or electric auto turn signals to some of the greatest creative lunch and dinner buffets I have ever experienced. True I felt like a dragon with a flaming mouth most of the time I was eating but I did learn how to enjoy even the pain of spice as long as I had a glass of fresh orange juice, something sweet or ice cream to contrast the spices in my mouth with.

When I reacted to my driver’s actions by putting up my hands to cover my eyes from the possible car crashes at every turn I was laughingly warned to watch out for the drivers in India.

The warning was truly well given.

Going Deeper into the East like Marco Polo in Reverse
From Colombo I went onto Chennai, India (once Madras) located near the southeastern tip of the Indian pennisula.

Chennai is a very ancient city that too tries to mix the ancient and the near contemporary. Ancient construction techniques are used to build the local EDS office building or the local Dominoes Pizza delivery shop.

Learning from the East
Visiting countries such as Sri Lanka and India as a citizen of the United States of America is a learning in itself. From our nearly anal obcession with geometrically laid out streets and driving laws to the totally amorphic conditions on their streets and aparently non-existent driving laws you truly experience the contrast between focused convergence and seemingly aimless divergence.

Going Home Again to Istanbul
From Chennai I traveled to Istanbul, Turkey stopping for a few hours in Dubai, the most modern convention/conference mecca of the world. In the 140 degree desert of Dubai lies the most modern airport with the largest and most contemporary duty-free mall, not shop or shops, a full-range mall. One lesson from those two hours was that creativity can occur in any environment no matter how harse or repressive to human existence.

Arriving in Istanbul was a pleasure, partly because I was being picked up by a friend I would spend much of my time with in her beautiful city and, because I had been their 3 times before. I was not going to experience the shocks of the unknown or simply imagined environments and cultures of Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and India. Instead I was returning to a favorite city that I have traveled extensively about with friends and alone.

Learning: Integration of Ancient, Old, Current and Future
One of the extensive creative learnings that Istanbul provided was the integration of ancient, old, current, future cultures, religions and peoples. The most distinct difference at first for westerners is that the populuation is over 90 percent Muslim with a very small minority of Christains or Jews. Yet there is a sense of peace that exists in the initially appearing chaos.

Wandering to Replenish My Creative Soul
This time in Istanbul I chose to walk or boat most places when I wasn’t riding in my friend’s car. Wandering through the streets basically unnoticed was a pleasure. It enabled me to explore, experience and examine the on-going creativity that surrounded me in the Bazaar, the commercial areas where the wholesale trading goes on or some of the most contemporary and pricey malls I have ever seen in the world. Combined with that were several strolls along the Bosphorus Straits on both sides, European and Asian.

Learning: Integrating Contrasts
A significant learning Istanbul comes from the fact that it is a city of over 20 to 24 million people and is the only city that exists in two separate continents connected by bridges. The learning is the value of contrasts and integration of contrasts to produce creativity and innovative ideas and solutions.

Revolving Back to Western World
Time to contrast again, a flight from Istanbul to Copenhagen. From ancient chaos to modern and contemporary highly controlled order. From high contrasts in nearly every aspect of life to sameness and uniformity, much by law and culture.

Learning: Control and Orderliness Can Produce Creativity
My first learning from returning to Copenhagen after 24 years was how controlled and orderly it is and apparently lacking in spontaneity and creativity. It took about a day to clear up my creative blinders from Istanbul, Chennai, Colombo and Kuala Lumpur and to begin to see the wonderful creativity in Copenhagen and the countryside of Denmark.

The learning…no matter how much control and systemization a culture may generate the natural desire for creativity will show through. In Copenhagen individual creativity does not seem to exist initially until you begin to look for it and become more open to experiencing it. Doors, doorways, entrances, window flower boxes, personal window displays, gardens, graphics, furniture, silverware, artwork, ceramics from artistic to everyday chinaware; these are what demonstrates the creativity of the Danish people as individuals and not just members of a highly refined creative nation. After once again seeing their creativity I felt more relaxed. Then I went with an Italian friend, who had arranged to be in Copenhagen while I was there, out to dinner to walk the streets at night and to visit Tivoli, one of the oldest amusement parks in the world. Viola, the internal creativity and desire for independence and divergency showed inside Tivoli even until 2 or 3 in the am.

From Refined Control to Refined Individualism with Control
From Copenhagen by train, boat, bus, foot and car I traveled for an entire day to Delft in the Netherlands across northern Germany to be welcomed by my cyberspace friend, Marc Tassoul, professor of creativity and industrial design plus a consultant and creator of the first creativity focused internet email discussion list, CREA-CPS.

Prior to this trip I had the pleasure of visiting and staying in Delft several times beginning in 1977. Delft is a walking town, medieval architecture and design combined with the most contemporary available in the world. Each integrated beautifully at a human scale. No high rise buildings within the city. Everything is located a few minutes away by foot.

Learning: Vary the Scale and Speed to Rejuvenate Creativity
The learning for me was in the need to vary the scale and speed of our lives to help expose, expand and enrich our natural and developable creative thinking traits and skills.

Delft is an example of a completely designed and integrated community. All that is built new is integrated to create a harmony that is rarely experienced in any other community, town, city or country.

Off to the Center of the British Empire: Shakespear’s Home
After an abundance of sensory enjoyment and ample time with friends I was off to England, Stratford specifically, to experience another small scale integrately designed community. What Stratford lacks in contemporary design it relishes in historic and singularly focused creatively. It is an entire community devoted to the creativity of one man, William Shakespear. Yet within and among all the curios and tourist attractions is the love of the beauty of the landscape and the blending of the architecture and contemporary life.

Learning: Change of Scenery Can Relish and Replenish Creative Spirit
A learning for me from Stratford is that I can enjoy intensely crowded streets and parks during the mid afternoon while being able to jump on my rented bicycle to travel off to the countryside in a very few minutes getting lost in the beauty of a travel along the Avon that William and Anne and their children probably walked hundreds of years ago. I can also bicycle or walk the same busy streets at dawn or late at night after the evening’s Shakespeare Theater performance as if I was the only person on earth.

Learning: Juxtapositioning Imagination
Added to that learning is the ease with which I can play with my imagination in a town like Stratford-on-Avon juxtapositioning my thoughts from contemporary life, talking with a political cartoonist I met on the train ride to Stratford to pretending I am a citizen of midevial time Statford walking to experiencing William’s latest creation at the theater.

Juxtapositioning in Time
From Stratford on Avon I traveled by train to Salisbury to meet a recently meet a cyberspace creativity friend, John Thomas, a retired teacher and creativity author and to return again for the third time to the time of the Druids at Stonehenge.

Every Town Possesses Vast Contrasts of Creativity
Salisbury provided a sampling for contrasting time comparing the famous Salisbury Cathedral to the Druid Circle of Stones at Stonehenge to experience distinctly different spiritual expressions of creativity. Walking the now controlled, physically and electronically, route around the world famous stones, then walking slowly around the famous cathedral both at midnight under the spotlights and in the early morning at day break simply experiencing both provided me a “creative soul” fill up.

Back to Modern Times
Off to London next, not really wanting to be there, except to meet up with some highly creative people at a creative consultant firm and St. Luke’s advertising agency, reported to be one of the most creative in the world today was my next planned destination.

Letting Go Once Again to Learn
Thank you goes to Joel Goodman again. I chose to laugh and to enjoy the on and off rain and chose to walk aimlessly the first day before meeting my contact at What If?!. From my visit at the offices of What If?! I received several tips for what to see in London today. I combined that with on and off rides around London via a constantly available series of double bus tour busses around the entire city. Instead of being frustrated by the scale and density of London I fell in love with experiencing parks from small squares to Hyde Park in size, art galleries with the work of Picasso, Dali, and many yet to be known as famous artists, the British Air Eye gigantic ferris wheel, etc.

Learning: Changing Perspectives Without Specific Plan
A learning from London this time came in the enjoyment and creative potential of constantly changing perspective and scale both deliberately and spontaneously as the spirit moved me. From the reconstructed Globe Theatre to walking along both sides of the Thames to the Tate Gallery to a seafood festival to a street musician playing an ancient Chinese instrument to a mix of varied food cultures.

What started out as depressing 3 days turned into fantastic and richly creative days.

It Can’t Be done!: Tunneling to Even More Creativity
Then it was off through one of the greatest examples of engineering creativity in Europe, the England to France tunnel under the English Channel. The learning: what seems impossible with today’s abilities can become easy with tomorrow’s.

Arriving in Paris is always fun. This was my 7th visit to Paris. My goal was to complete my trip in a beautiful city and give a speech to the newly formed French Speakers Association in Paris on my last night at the American Church along the Seine on creative thinking as a professional speaker.

Learning: Complete Openness to Experience Breeds Creativity
My 4 days and 3 nights in Paris and the surrounding area including Paris, many of its suburbs, Chartres and Disneyland Paris were nearly completely spontaneous filled with creative adventure and complete openness to experiences as they happened, minute by minute, hour by hour, person and experience by experience. Included was walking from the front door of my hotel with a complete view of the Eiffel Tower only a few blocks away, a view I would experience many times throughout the time I was there day and night.

The overall learning from my time in Paris this time was to remind myself to set basic goals, targets, that fulfill my mission and fit my vision while being open to experiencing life as fullly as possible at all times during the day each day.

Returning Home Once Again
73 Days in search of creativity, creative thinking and creative people from Athens, Georgia to Auckland to Paris and back to Athens again. I found and experience each of the three everywhere I went and so will all of use if we simply apply the natural traits of creative people and creative learnings that appear throughout our lives.

Traveling for Work: Journeys or Wanderings or Trips or Tours

2009-12-05T08:12:00.001-08:00

Traveling for Work: Journeys or Wanderings or Trips or Tours

MCI
AMA

When I began my journey towards becoming a creative thinking consultant I started without a plan and far too soon. I had had a job teaching at the University of Georgia in the Interior Design major of the Art Department. Trying to advance myself and to work with more serious and committed students I tried to land a teaching position in the School of Environmental Design where I had taught as an adjunct professor for two summers already. I was passed over initially for a much younger, just graduated candidate. I became very angry and frustrated because I had not expected nor planned for that possible turn in the road. Within a few days the successful candidate turned down the offer and the LAR dean called to offer me the position. I told him the only way I would take it then would be if it was offered as an associate professor position which I did qualify for after having taught for 4 years at the University already and having completed my doctorate in educational psychology majoring in the study of the teaching of creative thinking.

I didn’t get the job. My anger and demands killed any possibility.

Cie le vie. I instantly became a creative thinking consultant.

The next day I began making phone calls, setting up appointments and learning what a creative thinking consultant or any consultant needs to know: prospecting, selling, marketing and all the other tasks, many of which I was definitely not prepared for as an architect, designer, writer or college professor.

One day while I was going to appointments in Atlanta I walked by the Colony Square Complex and saw a sign for the American Management Association’s training center located in the complex. With an unforeseen sense of confidence I went in and asked to see someone to talk about how to become a trainer/speaker for the AMA. I met a wonderful semi-retired man, Reese Inge, who would become a great friend for the next few years until he died. Reese listened to me talk about what I thought I had to offer the AMA. He asked if I could come back at 3:00 that afternoon to meet someone who Reese believed would be interested in meeting me and could help me accomplish my goal. I did. I met Jack Sullivan that afternoon. He too listened. That meeting began a mentor/mentee relationship that lead to a professional friendship over the next 3 or 4 years.

Jack opened so many doors and catapulted or simply pushed me through them trying to help me become the professional marketing trainer he needed and the creative consultant that I dreamed of becoming. Those couple years were filled to the brim with joy, excitement, fleeting phases of confidence, disaster, pain and extreme stress as he tried to teach me from the wings usually, how to become a successful consultant while helping him make money. The first year or so was a mix of pure heaven and hell on earth. Being thrown into a room with 12 experienced sales and marketing people for 3 days to try to teach them Marketing Communication, which I knew very little of. I barely stayed a paragraph ahead of the participants day by day. My scores ranged from 20 out of a possible perfect score of 20 to 6 out of twenty with 3 participants demanding their money back.

I went home totally devastated, beaten, squashed under the roller of a steam roller named complete failure. I called Jack and Joan, his wife, that day and said I could not possibly go to Chicago that coming Sunday evening to teach an entire week-long, 5-day course on the Fundamentals of Marketing after such a failure with a 3-day course on Marketing Communications. They seemed to understand and agree.

By Sunday they had tried to find someone else to do the course the next week. By Sunday they had totally been unsuccessful. They called and said I had to go and tried to pep me up over the phone. My family needed the money desperately at the time so I really needed to go. Merry and Jessica were out of town that weekend. I spent most of Saturday, Saturday night and Sunday until I left for the airport reading, re-reading and re-reading again and again the course book and some other books I found in the UGA library Saturday afternoon. I arrived in Chicago late Sunday evening. I began the second course for Jack’s firm, that one being an overview course: The Fundamentals of Marketing on Monday morning and completed it Friday at lunch time.

My scores ranged from 20 to 12. I averaged 15+ with a group of 27 strangers. I never received a lower average score that 17 after that. I became obsessed in becoming knowledegable about everything to do with the Fundamentals of Marketing as I could over the next few years. Jack even convinced and sold the AMA on me rewriting the manuals for two of their most popular marketing courses that I taught each time for the next couple of years.

I had traveled through Hell on Earth and had survived. I grew throw much pain, frustration, stress and a great deal of committed hard work.

Over those few years I would travel to New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Wilmington, Virginia to teach marketing courses.

Why was I successful on these guided tours that I treated initially as wandering trips, then journeys and then a mix of highly planned journeys? I succeeded eventually because I studied other people’s maps, tour notes and triptiks while always creating my own plans, refining them every day as I traveled. If I had followed some of their guided tours it may have been much easier and less stressful but I would not have become as passionate about winning, succeeding and learning to become a knowledgeable and gifted trainer.

I was thrown into a raging river thinking that it was simply a slowly moving stream. I was not aware of the undercurrent that would try to pull me under and cause me to drown.

Have you ever done this? What did you learn from the experience?

My learnings were….

1. Know what you are getting into
2. Be willing to walk away if you fail
3. Learn as much as you can from both your failures and your wins.
4. Ask, ask and ask again for help
5. Give as much as you can and even more if necessary
6. Focus on what you know while learning as much as you can.
7. Be willing to commit 24 hours a day if necessary in the short run
8. Become focused
9. Systemize, systemize, systemize
10. Study every detail of your successes to discover why you succeeded
11. Study every detail of your failures to discover why you failed.
12. Back off once in awhile to relax, reposition and recenter your energies

How, where, when, why and from whom did I learn these in Chicago that week in 1985?

1. Know what you are getting into

I was so desperate that I did not check into what I was about to do when I so naively agreed to do the first Marketing Communications class. I wasn’t really ready. I basically winged it and mostly got away with it.

2. Be willing to walk away if you fail

I did. Yet I was pulled back by someone who desperately needed me and did truly believe in me and was confident that I would do okay.

3. Learn as much as you can from both your failures and your wins.

The weekend between the first failure and the second attempt I started focusing on studying everything I did to try to learn how to capitalize on my rights and to eliminate or improve my wrongs.

4. Ask, ask and ask again for help

I asked, asked and asked again and again from then on. I still do when I realized I need to and I am not at the moment. I try not to suffer from what I have heard called “the Moses Syndrome”. Do you know why Moses traveled for 40 years in the desert? Because he wouldn’t stop and ask for directions.

Now that your thunderous fit of laughter has ended, I had learned to stop and ask for directions. I still stop and ask for directions, even if I might appear foolish, dumb or stupid. I simply ask humbly for help. I discover what I need to know most of the time and also discover that most human beings are good people who want to help each other as much as they can.

5. Give as much as you can and even more if necessary

I gave and gave and gave to the participants in those courses. I became obnoxiously committed to the participants who had paid their money or their employers had while the participants had paid with parts of their lives. I took that payment deserving of more than my best. I continually worked at getting better. Now I didn’t commit every minute of every wakening hour of every day but I did commit a great deal of time to reading many articles, books and scanning many more that I brought home in boxes from the library or piled up in multiple piles on a library table each weekend I was not speaking somewhere. I took the equivalent of any masters of business degree in marketing and marketing management. I probably only earned really a C+ in the minds of sophisticated marketing experts but in the minds of most of the participants I would stand in front of the next few years I had earned more than an A+++.

6. Focus on what you know while learning as much as you can.

After trying to learn everything I could for a few months I slowly began to focus on what I seemed to understand the best and stopped trying to become an expert at everything. I focused on what I thought the actual participants would need and want to learn. I would take time to read magazines and parts of books relevant to each of the businesses, industries or government agencies that were represented by the participants who enrolled in the courses.

7. Be willing to commit 24 hours a day if necessary in the short run

I did simply that some times. I went without sleep or much sleep for most of the days I was on the road teaching or trying to teach the courses.

8. Become focused

I finally did take time to assess the specific courses and focused on the absolutely necessary and key points then studied them to add more and more to my knowledge and understanding of them.

9. Systemize, systemize, systemize

Wherever possible I began to systemize. Initially I set up folders for each topic and sub-topic. Then I set up file boxes for each or clusters or related ones. I ended up with several storage boxes of photo copied articles, chapters and pages along with a couple shelves of nothing but marketing books. I used the original outline order of the courses to set up my systems. The great benefit of doing that besides making it easier when I needed something immediately it also make it extremely easy to rewrite the workbooks for the courses when I was hired to.

10. Study every detail of your successes to discover why you succeeded

Nearly every morning over breakfast I took 30 minutes to a couple hours to think about what I had done successfully so that I could repeat those efforts and actions.

11. Study every detail of your failures to discover why you failed.

Also at breakfast I studied what I screwed up to discover what I could do to not screw up the next time.

12. Back off once in awhile to relax, reposition and recenter your energies

Finally I often would simply close up the books, put away the file folders and simply jump on the “EL” and go into Chicago to Rush Street just to have fun for the evening, sometimes far too late considering I had to start again the next morning by 8:00 and needed to be ready by 7:30 am.

Look at one of your current challenges or recent failures you would like to correct, eliminate or solve. Examine my 12 learnings and write out what you might do to become successful next time.

1. Know what you are getting into

2. Be willing to walk away if you fail

3. Learn as much as you can from both your failures and your wins.

4. Ask, ask and ask again for help

5. Give as much as you can and even more if necessary

6. Focus on what you know while learning as much as you can.

7. Be willing to commit 24 hours a day if necessary in the short run

8. Become focused

9. Systemize, systemize, systemize

10. Study every detail of your successes to discover why you succeeded

11. Study every detail of your failures to discover why you failed.

12. Back off once in awhile to relax, reposition and re-center your energies

List of Working Assignments, speeches, workshops, training programs.

MCI

AMA

New York City
Chicago
Washington, DC
Houston
Los Angeles
Indianapolis
Atlanta
Wilmington, VA

Indiana Food Co-Op
Houston
Los Angeles
Blue Ridge School
GE marketing session
PGA for large company
CertainTeed
Philadelphia
Minneapolis

IFB
Gold Kist
Knoxville -
Carrollton--west Georgia

CertainTeed
Savannah
Shakapee, MN
Cleveland, Ohio

Johnson & Johnson
Gainesville
Royston
Cornelia (?)

Wrigley Gum
Braselton
Flowery Branch

Georgia Pacific
Alabama
Florida
NC
Georgia
Savannah
Palatka
Myrtle Beach, SC

Georgia Pacific Supervisory program
Madison
Pine Mountain
Calloway Gardens

Duck Head
Athens
Winder
Monroe
Washington
Tennessee

Hospitals
Newton
St. Mary’s
Athens Regional
Habersham

Thiele Kaolin
Sandersville

Institute of Government
Athens
Gainesville
Macon
Douglassville
Savannah
Brunswick
Smyrna
Marrietta
Atlanta
Stone Mountain
Dekalb
Avondale
Chatham
GPSTC
Chief’s Association

GPSTC

Command College

Leadership Institute & Programs
Paulding
McDuffie
Chattooga
Habersham
Pickens
Dekalb
Jefferson
Jackson
Rome/Floyd
Cartersville
Cherokee
Rockdale
Forsyth
Athens

HFMA
Alabama twice
MMGA-Natchez
New Orleans
Lafayette
Florida-Ft. Lauderdale
San Diego
Georgia
Buffalo, NY

SRCUS

CU Mississippi
Florida
North Carolina
Georgia?
Atlanta area

Travel journey quotes

2009-12-05T08:10:00.002-08:00

Travel journey quotes

Here are some opening quotes from books that have greatly inspired many aspects of my life journeys and traveling.

“For the hundredth time I am going to answer someone’s questions about why I’m walking across America. It wasn’t that I minded talking about it or answering questions, it was just that I really didn’t know why myself.”
Peter Jenkins
A Walk Across America

“I would be making a journey, an essentially lonely journey, into myself, in search of something that was meaningful to me alone.”
David Smith
Healing Journey: The Odyssey of an Uncommon Athlete

“I began my pilgrimage on the first of January in 1953. It is my spiritual birthday of sorts. It was a period in which I was merged with the whole. No longer was I a seed buried under the ground, but I felt as a flower reaching out effortlessly toward the sun. On that day I became a wanderer relying upon the goodness of others. It would be a pilgrim’s journey undertaken in the traditional manner: on foot and on faith. I left behind all claims to a name, personal history, possessions and affiliations.

It would be a glorious journey.”
Peace Pilgrim
Peace Pilgrim Her Life and Work in Her Own Words

“We had the world and the roads all to ourselves.”
Peter Jenkins
A Walk Across America
p. 14

“I’m happy to be riding back into this country.”
“Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and maybe headed father than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”

“We saw it and yet we didn’t see it. Or we were trained not to see it.”
Robert Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

“The inspiration for brevity came to me at a gasoline station. I managed to fill an old car’s tank with super deluxe high-octane go-juice. My old hoopy couldn’t handle it and got the willies--kept sputtering out at intersections and belching going downhill. I understood. My mine and my spirit get like that from time to time. Too much high-content information, and I get the existential willies--keep sputterin out at intersections where life choices must be made and I either know too much or not enough. The examined life is no picnic.”
Robert Fulghum
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where…”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
Cheshire-Puss and Alice
Alice in Wonderland

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is (a) damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, …. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
Ishmael
Moby Dick
Herman Melville

“I’d been poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and son on, and on the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles.”
Jack Kerouac
On the Road

“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”
Henry David Thoureau
Walden

hat journeys have preceded Yours?

2009-12-05T08:10:00.001-08:00

What journeys have preceded Yours?
What journeys were taken so that yours could happen?
What journeys were bravely taken to make yours possible?

Imagine you are in the steerage section, the lowest deck on the Queen Mary, like scenes from the movie about the Titantic. You are mixed in with the very poor Irish, German, Slavic, Greek, Russian people, the peasants from many different countries, who have left everything they have known, left their families, their towns, their cultures. They have all left to find their own pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in America that they have heard so much about for so long.

To your left is a very old 16 year old girl, who has had to become a woman before she was done being a child. She is the 5th daughter of a linoleum factory worker and sister of 4 brothers and 4 sisters. She has left her two room home in a slum area of Kirkcaldy, a small town located across the Firth of Fourth from Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, a country of poor yet very proud people. She has begun her journey to America and her new life alone.

What waits for her across the Atlantic? A wealthy family who has agreed to sponsor her in exchange for her working for them for two years in their home in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She has contracted herself to be an indentured servant in exchange for passage to America plus room and board.

She would no longer play in the streets of Kirkcaldy, the town she loved, the town where she played tennis with friends and her sisters until nearly 11:00 pm many summer nights under the glow of the Northern Lights. She would not finish school with her classmates. She would not see her home again for nearly 40 years nor most of her family. Two of her sisters would also make the same journey but to Canada. One would stay there and live her new life in Toronto. The other would begin in Toronto then later move onto Detroit, where our traveler would meet up with her again two years later.

What is she thinking tonight? Is her heart filled with tears of sadness? Is her mind filled with the excitement of the journey she has chosen for herself? Is her soul filled with a passion for adventure?

To your right is a young boy by age but already a man. He has already worked over two years as a cart boy in the coal mines of Blythe, England, his birthplace. He’s 14 and is traveling with his mother and three brothers: 12, 10 and a baby less than 1. They have left their homeland to join her husband, their father in America to begin their new life in search of their pot at the end of the rainbow. They have left their loving families, their friends and neighbors, their town, country and culture, their proud history. He has not finished school either. But that is not important now. What is important is to leave the depression, the poverty, the pain that lies behind them and to start life over together.

What was it like for either of them to stand on the deck in the open air as they crossed the mighty Atlantic Ocean traveling towards their unclear dreams? Did they play with the children from all the other lands? Did they laugh, sing, skip and run? Did they stand, shivering, shoulders drooped from the wait of the sadness they each felt? Were they scared? Frightened by their journeys?

The girl ended up in Holyoke. She did work as an upstairs maid and sometimes a babysitter for the children. In two years she left for Toronto to join her two sisters who had also made their journeys away from Scotland and their pasts in search of new and different futures.

The boy landed at Ellis Island with his mother and three brothers. Shortly after arriving they were separated. His mother and his baby brother were taken away. He and his two brothers were left to fend for themselves not knowing what would happen next. In six weeks they were all on another boat returning to Blythe, England. They had been refused entry into the land of golden streets and pots of gold. The mother was found to have TB and denied entrance.

Once again the five of them return to the lowest decks of a ship. No happiness was in their hearts or on their minds any more. Their souls were darkened and saddened. They were going home. They were on a journey they did not want to take.

Within a short time after returning home the mother died. At her death bed the young boy, now even more a man before his time, prayed to God that he and his brothers not be separated. His young heart in an already too old body was broken. Within a few days the four boys were separated among relatives who would raise them: cousins, aunts and uncles. The father was not there. He worked as an engineer or a mechanic on ships and was rarely home, not even for his wife’s funeral.

When the boy was 16, his father and he once again boarded a passenger ship headed for America. They were going to McKeesport, Pennsylvania where the father had set up a home with his new wife and her children and would have each of his sons join him when they were old enough to work in their new land. The older brothers did join them in a couple years each. The baby, the youngest brother, did not join them until he brought his German war bride with him to live in the United States in 1949.

Our young traveler had taken two separate journeys to America. One filled with hope in his young heart. One probably filled with doubt and pain from his broken much older heart. He never returned to England though he earned enough money to afford it in his life. For him, England possessed only painful memories. His pain probably created anger which turned into determination to make something out of his life so no sons or daughters of his would ever have to experience the journeys he had.

These two young people traveled their journeys so that I might travel my own. They were my parents.

To these two people, who I hardly knew when they were alive, at least consciously, Johnann Coleman and James Eric Black, I gratefully devote the stories and messages of this book.

my life wandering & Merry

2009-12-05T08:09:00.002-08:00

my life wandering & Merry

I believe I have spent too much of my life being “un-me” to be accepted or trying desperately to be accepted by others. I have wanted to be accepted by: neighbor children, classmates, fellow workers, teachers, employers, the very few girl friends I had. Most of the time I have felt that I really wasn’t. I felt tolerated.

Merry was the only one whoever seemed to allow me to be the “real me” or at least somewhat the “real me”.

I fell in love with her. There were times it hurt to be away from her. Some times it hurt very bad. During the first few months we were together, especially the first couple after we first consecrated our relationship from constant kissing, embracing, hugging to sex until we had lived together and experienced our first joint high stress challenges.

Looking back now after 4 years time since she made her choice to end her pain I am no longer sure that “I ever really knew what was inside her heart” nor that she ever really knew “what was really inside mine.” In the beginning and over the first 15 or so years I believe that we each saw glimpses or trusted that we knew what was in each other’s heart.

Eventually as our lives changed. My life changed when my son, Jeff, was killed by a DUI. My life changed when all of my major clients decided to end our projects all within a couple weeks. My life changed when I lost enthusiasm for my work and confidence in my created occupation of speaking and consulting. Merry’s life changed due to all the struggle, strain and stress she put herself through to complete her doctorate and finally pass the psychological licensing exam to become a fully licensed psychologist. I lost my dream. Merry acquired hers. I was in daily pain due mostly to my lost dream and low self confidence or no longer seeing much value in anything I did. Merry became tired, burned out, and began experiencing nearly daily frustration even after “jumping all the dam hurdles” and getting what she wanted.

We no longer laid together just to be together. We no longer just laid on our sofa hugging each other sharing our love, releasing our pains knowing that we were each there to help ease the pains. We were not communicating. Without communication we stopped supporting each other or taking the time to try to understand in order to support.

We suffered. We created pain for each other, more pain than either of us needed or really could handle and still show love. We no longer were actively loving each other. Instead of love we just complacently existed or found fault or felt jabs, stabs and hits that hurt each day. We gradually grew more to accept life, to tolerate degrees of the shit that we threw at each other and we were feeling from our separate lives.

We had separated without consciously noticing it. We were no longer a single, loving, caring, devoted couple. Instead we were two hurting people craving without consciously or openly admitting that we need a hug, a kiss, a caress or simply to be warmly held and loved each day.

We would still do things together. We still went out to dinner or had lunch or breakfast together out. We still went out to the movies and enjoyed most of them. We still enjoyed watching good television shows. We still went to storytelling festivals or programs.

Instead of sharing our daily lives and dreams over a fun meal we just were there, much of the time. Me tolerating that this was what our marriage had become and she expressing over and over faults or bad habits I had, which I probably had had all through our relationship. I became more and more sensitive to the hurtful jabs and she continued to sharpen her corrective sword. Instead of accepting, loving, and enjoying we were tolerating, dealing with or trying to change the other.

Merry had begin exciting, fun, beautiful, sexy and very sexually driven. We enjoyed every time together in the beginning. When the shit hit the fan in our marriage we were two injured, hurting people. I was no longer the fanatic creative dreamer with an unlimited future destined, he thought, for fame and to change the world. Instead I was a lazy loser who no longer really tried and had failed to live up to his promise of always providing and taking care of Merry and all her dreams. Merry was no longer the sexy, sex driven, loving person who would kiss, embrace, hug or roll in the hay at any time. She had become a serious, psychologist, who wanted much more than I could than or would work hard enough to provide. I was not the provider she wanted. She was no longer the loving friend, wife, soul mate, sex kitten that had made my life exciting even during the times of shit from lack of money, high bills, no work or too much work, no respect or recognition or appreciation.

I had helped her through her periods of low self-esteem and self-doubt to when she took complete control over her professional life and proved she was as good as any of the licensed psychologists and was not simply a spiritual, New Agey, off-the-wall therapist or counselor who smiled and loved a lot. She was not there to help me through my depressions or manic to depressive moods to help me win over my self-doubt and ever lowering self confidence. Partially this was true because I no longer shared my concerns, my fears, my ever-growing weaknesses with her. I don’t recall believing I could share them with any one and still maintain any friendships, trust or love. I had allowed myself to become a loser, one who barely survived. I had no more highly motivating dreams, no goals, no desire to give a dam any more.

My doctorate hadn’t proved what I thought it would. I had winged it. I had faked it and still got it. It did not prove I was worthy of it. I hadn’t developed abilities to sell myself or my abilities. I didn’t believe in myself. I saw myself as a fraud, shallow, insignificant, a loser. I had chased after a dream like Winnie the Pooh or Willie Loman without a plan without studying what I was doing or would do if something didn’t go as planned. I had lost so much chasing my dream: my son to a drunk driver, my parents before I was mature enough to want to know they as people and friends, the few friends I had had before, respect for myself, respect for most things and people around me. I was play acting, filling my days with activities. Through some degree of luck I and we did not end up on the street with nothing.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Merry & I Wanderings

What lessons did we learn from our travels together?
What styles did we demonstrate when we traveled?
Why was traveling important in our lives, individually and together?
How were her early travels similar or different from mine?
Merry with Clifford: Europe, Israel, hitchhiking across Europe
Me alone in Europe
Us together in England, Scotland, Wales and France
What patterns were there in our travels?
How might our lessons, patterns or styles help other people individually, in their relationships, in their growths or educations?

Chicago & Detroit 1979 Thanksgiving
Ruby Falls

Tampa 1978

Trinidad & Tobago
Jessica sleeping on floor while we danced
American night at the Hilton
Lallo
wedding-bridge and groom showed up 3 hours later
drive through countryside around the island
workshop with Ruth Noller & Bob Johnston and islanders
the Scarlet Ibis Hotel and the knife
the taxi cab drivers, our driver and the knife
the knife and the chair w/ a glass

England, France, Scotland, Wales
Wales and the little train…riding to the pub in Jaguar
Beatrice Potter
Durham
York
London
Tate Gallery
luncheon on the grass
tiny hotel
Chartres
speaker, Malcolm Miller
grocery and picnic
wandering through the town
Versailles
the grounds
searching for a room
Findhorn
Stratford-on-Avon
Willie’s backyard Mulberry tree
Castle
bicycle ride
saucy faggots and bangers
bicycle to theatre
seeing John
drinking the night away w/ John
buying the ceramic w/ no money
taxi home from Miami
walking Paris
Brighton
boat ride across north Atlantic
Middle Ages town
Coventry
Canterbury

Buffalo and CPSI in Baron von Bus
Falling Waters
Pennsylvannia town, classic architecture

Charleston
aircraft carrier
historic walk

Savannah
bicycles
history center
Mrs Wilkes’
expensive house on anniversary (of something?)
walks along the river
Tybee Island
Savannah Beach

Walks in the woods in Georgia
Panther creek
Unicoi
Anna Ruby Falls
Appallation Trail

Trip to NJ at Christmas
Washington, DC
skating
Steve’s house
Mom’s Home
walking around in Upper Montclair

CPSI Springboard and Ft. Lauderdale “honeymoon” week
Ruth Noller
Cam Barth
Bob ?
LeRoy Schneider

Jonesborough, Tennessee
workshop with Sid Leiberman and Barry Tolkien
Storytelling Festival 3 or 4 years?
SOS Winter Festivals
the snow & Jessica
my convening

SOS
the festivals
the members: Chuck, BJ, Fiona, etc.
the Spring Festival 2 or 3 or more

Tell It on the Mountains
Asheville
the Biltmore House
the Biltmore Village
the shops
the tea room

High Point
Nido Qubein’s workshop on Marketing

New Orleans
my speech
riding the street car on Canal street
walking the river
the riverboat
brunch at Commander’s Palace
dinner on way back from Lafayette
dinner at modern restaurant in quarter
the church square
walking the riverfront development/mall

Augusta
last time with passing the kidney stone
one of the first times at the English Pub
walking the river front
touring the historic district

Brunswick
Jeykll Island

Little Cumberland
Kay’s place
the live crabs
fishing on the ocean
crab trapping

Hunting Island
Beaufort, South Carolina
setting up Baron von Buss
going into town
meeting the architects who had worked with Louis I. Kahn
having drinks at the one architect’s concrete house
the French restaurant with Jessica and Robin

Northeast Georgia trip(s)
Dillard restaurant and town
Eating in the restaurant on the square in Cleveland (?)
??? House, taking own wine
Thanksgiving in Helen
Helen, Georgia
Dahlonega
Cornelia
Ft. ? , Alabama
visiting Jess at Berry

Visiting Jessica at camp
Highlands
playing miniature golf
the waterfalls, walking behind it visiting Jess at camp

Social Circle
Blue Iris
house and buggy ride on her birthday

Small town near there where we ate in the little restaurant

Lafayette
the dinner
Merry shopping w/ Varnado’s wife

Florida
1979
1980 last time
Hurricane and Jean Houston
week with the kids
Tampa
honeymoon on Singer Island

Cortona
Ian and bathroom tour
Delft and mitt slag
Van Gogh museum
hotel w/ tiny, winding stairs
Sienna no Pallio
Venice
Milano
Sorrento
Capri - no trip to Naples
Swiss border
Cologne
Mittleberg
Amsterdam
our day traveling Netherlands
Enthusen
Hoorn
Amsterdam
Rotterdam
Utrecht
town with the towers
Assissi
Pompei

CPSI
1979
1980
1981 Baron von Bus
trying to meet up w/ Brian, Rosalie and kids

1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997 Merry’s first seizure
1998 the service, the people

HFMA - 2nd trip to northwestern tip of Florida
Coca Cola owner’s home and gardens

science fair w/ boys and clown makeup

Macon

Life Is a Creative Journey, If You Choose It To Be

2009-12-05T08:09:00.001-08:00

Life Is a Creative Journey, If You Choose It To Be

When you wake in the morning how much of your life is your own choice each day?

Many motivational speakers no matter their background saying….it is all your choice. That is true in principle yet is it what people truly do?

If we are truly financially independent most of our lives can probably become our own choices. If we accept living very simply most of our lives can be the result of our own choices.

In reality we do not make all the decisions or make all the choices. Some choices will and are made by others: our culture, government, family, friends, professions, occupations, employers, employees, All of these make some of the choices that impact and are part of our lives.

If we are married our spouses make many of the choices. This can be good or painful.

I have been married twice. The first time choices that involved my wife and family mostly were made by my wife. I accepted them, expected them and mostly lived with them. That is what I thought a good husband did. During my much longer second marriage my late wife and I made most of the decisions jointly or accepted that when one of two of us did not accept the other’s choice they could make another if it did not prevent the other from making their choice. An example would be going to a particular party or gathering or meeting. We agreed not to force each other into following our choice if they did not, most of the time.

As an employee over 20 years I generally accepted, expected and lived with most of the choices that were made by my employers and supervisors. If I didn’t I moved on. When I didn’t accept or abide by their choices often enough I was invited to move on to other employment (fired, downsized, laid off).

As an independent consultant, self-emplorer, I have generally made my own choices and/or abided by my client choices. When I could not abide by a client’s choice we ended our relationship or contract.

Life is a choice.

Living is a choice.

Working together or with a particular person or company ought to be a choice.

Do we have obligations? Yes. I happen to believe that the obligations ought to be comfortable results of the choices we make, therefore not really obligations.

Obligation…definition

Lessons My Journeys & Wanderings Have Taught Me

2009-12-05T08:08:00.001-08:00

Lessons My Journeys & Wanderings Have Taught Me

the following is a listing of lessons, learnings, premises I have learned to live by or accept as probably being more true than not

my purpose for this chapter is to discover and discover and learn more from learnings and lessons I have discovered from my journeys and wanderings

one of my goals is to discover a pattern or series of categories for these lessons, learnings so that I can create a chapter that asks the readers to examine the lessons, learnings they have from their life travels

Sources of anecdotes, stories, memories, lessons, learnings

United States 49 - 62
United States 66 - 76
United States 78 - 97
United States 84 - present

Europe 77
England-France-England-Scotland-Wales 78
Tobago-Trinidad 79
Netherlands-Italy-Cortona, Italy-Switzerland-Germany-Netherlands 82
Netherlands 90
South Africa 98
Turkey 99
South Africa 99
Turkey 00
World 01
South Africa 01
Mauritius 01
England 02 twice
Scotland 02
Mexico 02
World 03
South Africa 03
Korea 03

I learned I can survive in new situations, cultures, cities with strangers

I learned I am more comfortable with new people who I try to meet immediately and am friendly with or without knowing them than I am with people I have had much contact with who think they know me and I think I know them

I discovered I like new rather than same most of the time

I discovered I can learn on the run

I learned that I see things differently than other people and that I can not always change other people’s accepted ways, norms, rules, regulations (Switzerland)

I learned I can generally talk easily and get along easily with new people than with people I have been around a lot or many times or often

I learned I love nature from the dramatic to the simple and from graceful to the coarse and harsh

I learned I love history, present and future and not simply only one of them

I learned (Cortona) that I do not like history just because someone else has said I should

I learned I love good design no matter when, how, where, by whom it was designed

I love beautiful things

I love to wander to stroll to simply experience without knowing what will happen next

I learned I can fit or blend in and feel as if I belong no matter where I am

I learned that though I have some culturally created habits I feel more like a and want to be citizen of the world

I learned to see myself as a visitor, wanderer or guest not a tourist

I learned I dislike inconsiderate people

I learned I dislike demanding, inflexible people

I learned I bore easily

I learned I like some forms of excitement

I learned I love walking new places whether on the tops of the mountains in northern Norway, the streets of Stratford-on-Avon, the country roads of England, Scotland, Wales, France, the Netherlands, anywhere

I learned I…

can find peace nearly anywhere, any time

can appreciate and enjoy most people

have an artistic soul

appreciate many forms of art and design

enjoy lots of food

love variety

dislike hot, spicy food, while I can survive it

enjoy watching people

studying a scene

experiencing just to experience…walking the Seine from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame, wandering the streets of Chartres, Conpenhagen, Munich, Venice, Rome, London

dislike crowds

dislike being controlled

can manage in a foreign land without knowing the language

by giving respect you can earn respect

that respect is best learned by giving first

by being humble and asking for assistance most people will go out of their way to help you sincerely

can take time to…
enjoy things
pamper myself
have fun
challenge myself

renting a bicycle in Stratford-on-Avon was great fun
riding my bicycle all around the town was fantastic
I saw things on my own on my bicycle that I never saw with Merry or when I was there alone the first time
I had become a different person since 1977 and 1978, I was more relaxed, more confident, more sure of myself, more relaxed
I explored more
I saw much more of the town
I also discovered that I was not as healthy or strong a bicycler as I thought I was on the road to Warwick
I learned I had to accept my limitations gracefully and realistically

I learned I love seeing and looking for new things in windows, on streets, along paths, in the countryside from busses.

I learned I can have fun wandering and using tour busses to wander

I learned that I do get stressed when I experience multiple negative things or resistances

I learned that often if I simply stop and ask “Will I laugh about this later or be able to talk about this easily in a story later, then why not start laughing now!”

I learned that I sense fear or become fearful in situations, especially or more often at night

walking back from the Eiffel Tower

I love open spaces

I hate people who are selfish or do not share what ought to be available to everyone….small parks in London

I love parks: all the countries I have been in and all the states or cities I have been in

I love water: rivers, streams, creeks, waterfalls, lakes, ponds, the edge of the ocean or large lakes

I love unusual vistas, perspectives, places where I can see further and more, I can see what I could not see from anywhere else

I love peace and quiet of the early morning in cities…London, Stratford, Paris, Copenhagen

I dislike rush hour…crowded bus of Melbourne, London, crowded subways of Paris, London, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore

I love cable cars, open elevators, elevators of glass on the outside of buildings, high towers

I love Chartres

I love to be around people who love what they do and where they are

Physical
Emotional
Mental
Intellectual
Spiritual
Social
single
joint

When you meet the Buddha on the Road Kill Him - Sheldon Kopp
or…
Question him
Talk with him
Respect him
Challenge him
Learn from him
Honor him as a human being
Honor him as a very caring human being

Don’t bow down at the feet of gods, heroes, saints, champions
Honor them
Respect them
Learn from them
Help them
Help them do what they are doing
Then move on

Respect rules, laws and order
yet question them if they do not fit or make sense any longer
or in a given situation

Benefits from the boxes in your life
Change the boxes that hinder or hurt
Break or step out of detrimental or negative boxes
Return to boxes when it helps you

when the student is ready
the teacher will appear

take notes
Think
Create and write down your own understandings and thoughts

Re-read
Review
Rethink
Recreate
Rewrite

From chaos can come creativity

Think about wwwwwh change is going to happen or might happen

Remember gardens overgrow

People grow up, mature, get older

Everything changes

Change does not necessarily equal or produce creativity

Creativity always produces change

Look for patterns everywhere and in every situation

Use systems to simplify the complexity of the universe

Notice, read, study, understand the signs, signs you find, see, discover, pass, come upon

Remember crap/shit/bad stuff happens

Many solutions are not what you truly want/need/desire/dream of/crave

Find good more of the time than bad

In all bad find good

Just because it has always been that way
Or done that way
Does not mean that it is the only way or the correct or the right way

Look for and generate possibilities and probabilities rather than look for or accept absolutely correct answers or answers that others, authorities or not, give you

Accept more than you reject

Don’t strive to reject or negate

Turn around and learn, see, enjoy what you have passed

See, experience, smell, taste, hear, touch from multiple perspectives and directions and positions

Enjoy what you have and have done

We open to what is around you

Open all your senses to see the birds, smell the flowers, hear the wonder of nature

Enjoy the wonder of nature, people, life, the universe

Keep in touch with people

Help people

Offer to help people

Always ask how may or might i help you

Spend little
Save much

Don’t tear out weeds until you really know they are truly weeds

Read, listen, visit many
Make up your own mind based on many and much experience and thought

Accept little as absolute fact

Accept little on face value

Accept little on surface value

Accept little on first impressions

Accept yet challenge first impressions

Give people chances yet do not risk with them

Question, question, question and question again

Be human, real, nice, humble

Put or have meaning and purpose in your life

Having specific direction(s) in your life are helpful

Being flexible and willing to adjust, modify, change will create your life

S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
substitute when you need or choose to
combine to produce even better solutions and options
adapt when necessary or need to or choose to
modify, minify, maximize
put to other uses to create even better results
eliminate what is no longer necessary
reverse to explore, examine and create better or newer results

Learn how you learn

Learn how others learn

Learn various ways to think, communicate, teach, learn

Learn how to be a team member when it is necessary

Learn how to coordinate the efforts, skills, abilities, talents, knowledge of others

Look until you see

Listen until you hear

Touch until you truly feel

Sense until you truly feel

Taste until you enjoy

Wander

Use direct routes when you need to

Put order into your life

Design your life

Search and create unity in your life

Put focus in your life

Have focus in your life from what you do this instance to what you want you life to have stood for or represented

Set goals

Persist

Commit

Help

Integrate your dreams, wishes, goals, talents, skills, abilities and knowledge

Give honesty most of the time

Be honest unless it would hurt
Base this decision on the significance and importance of the situation and the person involved

Accept decisions/discoveries as potential realities but not permanent ones

Balance is helpful

Balance can be informal, formal, unseen, unknown, simply felt

Seek harmony
Strive for harmony
Create harmony
Live in harmony whenever you can
Do all these as much as you can in your life and through your deeds and actions and thoughts

Do not waste

Treat the earth, its elements, all animals, all forms of life from plants to animals, all elements, nature as sacred

Use what, eat what you take

Share

Help others obtain what they basically need and to learn how to obtain it alone

Find use for what you do not use or need

WHY DO YOU TRAVEL?

Fun
Relaxation
Business
Earn an income
Earn a reputation
To educate
To help
To learn
To release stress
To unwind
To change
To experience change
To experience variety
To experience new
Meet new people
See new places
Do new things
Eat new food

Journey, wander, tour, take trips….to learn to grow to share to experience

I share my…..

Discoveries
Learnings
Lessons
Observations
Questions
Doubts
Impressions
Hunches
Doubts
Premises

What are the following, define them. Then rank them in order of occurrence

Data
Information
Knowledge
Wisdom

Always ask is this worth it or worth doing
Always ask will this be worth doing or the results and effects it may produce

What will it require we do afterwards?

Always an outsider
Always an outsider who steps in and out or simply in and then leaves

Work more creatively not simply more or harder

Don’t sell
Meet people
Make friends
Discover what help they need
Help them if you can help them best

Work with friends not strangers

Ask???????

How else
What else
Where else
When else
Who else
Why else
In what other ways
What if we didn’t
What might work
What has worked before
What has worked for others
What is working for others

communicating

be sincere
be honest
be kind
be firm when necessary
be strong when necessary
use a variety of communicating tools
match your style of providing information with their way of receiving information
speak at a speed that is understood
always ask for feedback
focus on body language/reaction
test with challenges messages and thoughts to be sure they understand and are listening
take time to listen periodically
communicate less than you receive feedback
consider the location
consider the timing
consider the situation
consider the people
consider the message
consider the source of the message
consider how you are delivering the message
consider the current willingness of people to accept or understand your message
pace your communicating
make your communicating interesting, fun, meaningful, valuable, relevant and memorable (different enough to be remembered)

coordinating

do not take charge unless it is necessary
coordinate do not lead
share the lead
take turns leading
let the most effective or most knowledgeable person lead in the situation
let people make honest mistakes
encourage and support learning from mistakes
make sure people know what they are suppose to do and how to do it
make sure people know why they are doing what they doing
make heroes of them, individually and jointly
support all the people
encourage all the people
help people win and become champions
challenge to help them grow
strive to reach success for everyone
guide rather than boss
boss when necessary
inform
keep everyone informed
help everyone truly understand
make developing everyone one of your major responsibilities
be focused
persist
be consistent

collaborating

team people
teach/train people to know how to be team members and team leaders
let people be the type of team people that is natural to them
if some of your people are loners let them be Olympic team members
if some of your people are dependent upon or prefer working with others most to all of the time provide that opportunity as often as possible
listen to everyone
encourage everyone to listen to everyone else
deal with crap
accept no crap
watch for conflict
work conflict into something of value, minimum being acceptance that conflict does exist
strive to have everyone accept, appreciate, learn from, understand everyone else
do not attempt to change anything or anyone or any aspect of anyone unless necessary

cre8ng

support creative thinking in everyone
promote creative thinking in everyone
recognize creative thinking in everyone
encourage creative thinking in everyone
actualize/apply/activate creative thinking in everyone
develop creative thinking in everyone

then support, promote, recognize, encourage, actualize/apply and develop everyone’s creative thinking at higher and higher levels more and more of the time in more and more situations, locations, cases

teach and practice creative thinking tools and techniques to enhance and expand the creative thinking abilities, skills and knowledge of everyone

be creative sometimes just to have fun and build rapport, increase morale to change moods and focus to disrupt trains of thought to explore new understandings or discoveries

become more and more willing to explore and accept more creative thinking and creativeness in yourself and everyone else

Inspirations Behind Journeys

2009-12-05T08:07:00.001-08:00

Inspirations Behind Journeys

Since my early 20s I have been reading books looking for inspiration. Many of them have provided it. Sometimes the inspiration lasted for a long time: weeks to months. Sometimes it only lasted until I got up from the table, got into my car and drove to my job or career du jour.

The writing of Journeys has been inspired by many people: authors and friends and plus personal and professional experiences. The most recent set of experiences came from my 73 Day Wandering Journey around the world that I took in 2001.

Here are some opening quotes from books that have greatly inspired many aspects of my life journeys and traveling.

“For the hundredth time I am going to answer someone’s questions about why I’m walking across America. It wasn’t that I minded talking about it or answering questions, it was just that I really didn’t know why myself.”
Peter Jenkins
A Walk Across America

“I would be making a journey, an essentially lonely journey, into myself, in search of something that was meaningful to me alone.”
David Smith
Healing Journey: The Odyssey of an Uncommon Athlete

“I began my pilgrimage on the first of January in 1953. It is my spiritual birthday of sorts. It was a period in which I was merged with the whole. No longer was I a seed buried under the ground, but I felt as a flower reaching out effortlessly toward the sun. On that day I became a wanderer relying upon the goodness of others. It would be a pilgrim’s journey undertaken in the traditional manner: on foot and on faith. I left behind all claims to a name, personal history, possessions and affiliations.

It would be a glorious journey.”
Peace Pilgrim
Peace Pilgrim Her Life and Work in Her Own Words

“We had the world and the roads all to ourselves.”
Peter Jenkins
A Walk Across America
p. 14

“I’m happy to be riding back into this country.”
“Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and maybe headed father than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”

“We saw it and yet we didn’t see it. Or we were trained not to see it.”
Robert Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

“The inspiration for brevity came to me at a gasoline station. I managed to fill an old car’s tank with super deluxe high-octane go-juice. My old hoopy couldn’t handle it and got the willies--kept sputtering out at intersections and belching going downhill. I understood. My mine and my spirit get like that from time to time. Too much high-content information, and I get the existential willies--keep sputterin out at intersections where life choices must be made and I either know too much or not enough. The examined life is no picnic.”
Robert Fulghum
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where…”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
Cheshire-Puss and Alice
Alice in Wonderland

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is (a) damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, …. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
Ishmael
Moby Dick
Herman Melville

“I’d been poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and son on, and on the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles.”
Jack Kerouac
On the Road

“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”
Henry David Thoureau
Walden

I finally made my decision to travel to leave my daily life behind for a couple months in September, 2000. Over the next 8 to 9 months I spent a great deal of time planning. In 1976 I had made a similar decision about leaving my daily life for 3 months to travel around Europe. This time I was determined to do a better job of planning based on the many things I had learned over the 25 or so years since my first personal pilgrimage.

My first decision was to take off for two months and spend them in two countries I had never been to before: Australia and New Zealand. I began by spending many hours writing to people over the internet asking for tips, suggestions and advice. When I thought of a local friend who had traveled to Australia or New Zealand I would call them and set up time to talk to them about their experiences and ask for their recommendations. I did the same thing every time I discovered someone else who had been to or lived in Australia or New Zealand.

Everybody had suggestions and I was greatly thankful for all that so many gave me.

Not long after I had decided to travel down under, with a possible stop over in Fiji, two friends suggested I travel “all the way around” the world. I laughed when I read their first email message. I knew they had taken such a trip just a couple years before and it had taken them six months. I only had two months. I didn’t want to jump from country to country. I had learned during my trip around Europe in 1977 that 3 days is a good amount of time added to travel and time change or jet lag adjustment time to comfortably experience a country or city. Otherwise you should stay 30 years. So the idea of traveling completely around the world in 2 months was out of the question.

Before their email helped to change my mind I had already gone to the local library and checked out several books about both New Zealand and Australia. I had methodically started going through the piles of books one by one each day for an hour or two. I had nine months to become prepared. I was going to really be ready this time when I left home.

Once the thought of traveling completely around the world had bounced around in my mind for a few days I called my friends and we talked for at least an hour about how they had done it and what they had learned that might help me. There were the names of airplane ticket brokers, names and phone numbers of airlines in different countries to check out, train passes, tips on how to get visas, what insurance policies to get, suggestions on how to pack and what I might carry.

I was becoming excited. I was going to travel completely around the world in one trip. I was going to fulfill a life-long dream of following in Phileas Fogg, Esq’s footsteps. I was going to go around the world in two months, 60 or so days, not the 80 days from Jules Verne’s famous novel. After being on my trip for a couple days in New Zealand, to be specific, I unsuccessfully searched for a few hours through several bookstores in the beautiful university town, Dunedin, in the southern part of the south island, and ended up ordering a copy of Around the World in Eight Days that I picked up when I returned to the Auckland airport a week later. It was waiting there right at the bookstore/newsstand I had remembered wandering around in when I had 5 hours to kill in Auckland’s airport the day I arrived from Los Angeles. Then each night I read about Mr. Fogg’s great journey comparing it to mine. It took him 80 days winning him a bet. It ended up eventually taking me 73 days.

My first step was to call my friend’s recommended airplane broker and describe my basic plan and ask her to put together a realistic working price so I could decide whether it would really be feasible. I gave her my total list of possible countries: Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, Japan, Bali, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Turkey and England.

A few days later she called with her “ballpark” estimate. It was a doable. She gave me 3 alternative plans. I chose the one that fit my preferred price range. It meant I could not go to all of the countries. One of the problems with prices is that to arrange the lowest fares you need to continue you trip in one single direction and not double back. That meant that certain countries would not fit. I told her to start checking on availability of tickets.

While she was doing her work I met Arne from Copenhagen at a creativity conference in St. Paul, Minnesota. During the conference one afternoon I overheard him mention that he was part of a creativity association in Denmark. I quickly asked him if he thought his association would be interested in having me speak at one of their monthly meetings while I was traveling around the world. I hadn’t planned initially on going to Denmark. But what the heck, why not.

So I called “my” air broker with my plan change.

Later one morning I got an email newsletter that included a request from a woman in Paris asking for American speakers to come speak for her speakers organization when they were in Paris. I wrote to her and said I would be in France that summer. I hadn’t planned on it initially. But what the heck.

So I called “my” air broker once again to change my plans.

Actually Kristin and I would talk often and 3 times that many times over the internet over the next couple months, actually about 6 months. We talked right up to a week before I left when the tickets she had arranged and rearranged over those long months finally arrived by Federal Express at my hotel in Buffalo, New York. That package stayed with me for the next 78 or 79 days, never out of my reach. It held all my country to country airplane tickets.

Back to my researching of the trip. Initially I went to our local public library and checked out several travel books for most of the countries I was then thinking about going to: Fuji, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, China, Taiwan, Bali and Japan. After scanning through all of them I read a selected few cover to cover. When I found an especially good book I bought my own copies, especially the latest editions that I could not find in the library.

There were books about the history, culture and customs of the countries. There were tour books. There were hiking, bicycling and typical touring books. I found the Maverick Guide books. Then I found the Lonely Planet books: Tramping in New Zealand, . After those there were the Traveler Companion books, the Bed and Breakfast books for New Zealand and Australia and the Japan made easy type books. Then I found Bill Bryson’s newest travel book, In a Sunburned Country, about Australia.

My dining room table looked like a smorgasbord bookstore or library with its piles and more piles of books sorted out by country. I had my newly purchased world map and my Australia and New Zealand maps posted on my dining room wall so I could check out where what I was reading about was located. Eventually I purchased maps for each of the other countries so I could become more familiar with the countries to decide truly where and when I really wanted to go during my trip.

Then the more specific reading started, an hour to two hours each day, sections of one, two, sometimes three or four different books being read each day, a page to a chapter a day. There were the picture books. The exploring books. The basic touring books. The promotional tourist books.

Slowly I dwindled down the piles as I surveyed them deciding which were the most interesting and would help me the greatest amount. From those came my favorites. One titled Sydney that I read from cover to cover, that told the history of Sydney from penal colony to thriving contemporary Olympic City. Bryson’s book held my interest completely through it. He had taken the type of tour of Australia that I wanted to take ideally, visiting all 8 Australian states and territories. The only difference was he took almost a year. I was going to take 3 to 6 weeks.

I added backpack travel tips books: packing, hiking, train and bus travel. I had learned a lot about how to travel by train and bus when I traveled all around Europe in 1977 alone. But as I read about the countries I would travel to this time it was obvious that there were distinct differences in how you travel on trains and busses in Australia, New Zealand, the far east or in eastern and western Asia.

After I would finish my travel reading for the day I would go upstairs to read my morning supply of emails and to begin my work day, either preparing for my next speech or workshop or writing some correspondence to a new potential client. Often the long list of emails had messages related to my upcoming trip. One such day I got an email that would greatly change my approach to my traveling. My creativity friends: Andre de Zanger and Judith Morgan had written to remind and re-encourge me to consider joining SERVAS, an international travel organization committed to the development of friendship and freedom through the opening of members’ homes to other members (fellow citizens of their country or internationals) to stay at while they were traveling.

It took a few emails and phone calls to locate the right office and to request material about joining the organization. Once I got it I read everything and decided to try to join it. In the material was a list of local members. One of the names was a speaker I knew, who lives in Atlanta. I called him. He didn’t respond for a few days. It turned out he was out of the country traveling at the time. When he returned we talked at length about the organization and how it best works and how to become both a traveler and a host member.

After submitting my application I was required to be interviewed by a local member. I chose another member rather than my speaker friend and called her. We talked for awhile over the phone. She explained that I would need to complete the application and request two friends to write letters of recommendation for me. My time was running out.

After all the paperwork was completed we set up a meeting date, as soon as possible. When we met we had great fun getting to know each other while she asked me many questions about my life, my reasons for traveling and about my past traveling experiences.

What seems like an easy, straight forward process took weeks to complete. After completing all the application process, then I had to order the membership directories from the countries I was going to travel it and request that they be shipped immediately. It was some of the best spent time and money. I ended up joining both as a traveling and a host member. While I traveled in New Zealand and in Australia I stayed with many different SERVAS members in their homes. While staying in their homes I had the opportunity to blend into their daily lives while still having plenty of time to explore their city, town or village.

I was able to set up all my host arrangements via the internet. When I wrote to hosts in specific cities I was still unsure what my final plan would be. Because I was new to the organization and wasn’t sure might happen so I wrote to 4 or 5 hoping that one would agree to be my host. Usually 3 to 4 or all 5 of them would offer to host me. It became a tyranny of numbers. I needed 5 or 6 hosts during my time in New Zealand and 8 or 9 in Australia. I had to juggle them for weeks while my trip was coming together. The SERVAS members were fantastic.

When one or two had to cancel out because of a personal matter or because I had modified my schedule they usually recommended other members as potential hosts. One even had some sudden damage to her home and she made arrangements for a substitute host and ended up becoming my day host. She surprised me by showing up with a friend as our driver when I arrived in Hobart by plane from Melbourne. She and her friend were waiting for me in the airport as I came down the entry ramp with sign in hand and giant friendly smiles.

Back to the beginning of my actual trip.

My first hosts were in Christchurch, New Zealand my first destination. My understanding from my interviews with different members in the states and from reading all the literature the central office sent me was that my hosts would open their homes to me and provide perhaps one meal. Beyond that the organization highly recommends two night stays to give the travelers and hosts time to spend time together to get to know each other. If hosts offer the stay may be for 3 or 4 days but that is not to be expected or typical. For me it happened a couple times.

Phillipa, my first host was waiting for me when I arrived by plane from Auckland. I had left my home about 2:00 pm in Athens, Georgia on June 25th and arrived at 5:00 am on June 27th in Auckland, where I waited until my 10:00 am flight to Christchurch. I was pysched up. I seemed awake even though I had only slept for only a couple hours the whole length of the flight across the Pacific. My plans for the day had been set up long before over the internet. I would arrive and either go directly to my host’s house to meet them and drop off my things and then go off to town to meet with my New Zealand National Speakers Association contact for lunch to make final arrangements for my speech that evening at their monthly meeting. Then in the afternoon I would travel around the central part of Christchurch returning to my host’s home only to clean up before leaving for my planned presentation.

Instead of having to find a cab or bus, there was Phillipa patiently waiting for me with her wonderful friendly smile. I have arrived in many countries and towns in my life but nothing beats being greeted by a warm, smiling, happy face who is looking forward to you arriving. We drove directly to her and her husband Jonathon’s home talking all the way about ourselves, our countries, our mutual love for travel. When we arrived she showed me around their home and my room during my stay and offered to drive me back into town to meet Charles, my contact for the evening program.

Throughout my traveling in the United States, Canada and Europe I have discovered that people are friendly all around the world. What I discovered that morning is that New Zealanders are the masters and could teach even the best of the best how to be even more friendly.

I Will Never Forget

2009-12-05T08:06:00.002-08:00

I Will Never Forget

2001 Wandering Around the World

Phillipa and Jonathon, their 3 children (oldest son the artist), their friend, their house, their calling Dunedin to try to set up another host for me there. The way they opened their home to me with such kindess.

buying them the chocolates, animal shapes

Jonathon’s smile and hug/handshake at the train station

the man on the train to Dunedin
his friendly smile
our ongoing fun talking
the electrical trouble on the train to Dunedin

Dunedin

the commercial area
the residential area
the views from up the hill
the octagon
the friendly people at the Ansett office
the natural food restaurant
McDonald’s and its Cyber Café
the dept store
the train hotel
losing my first umbrella
the bookstore person who helped me order, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS so it would be waiting for me in Auckland at the airport’s bookstore when I arrived there in a week or so.

journey to Queenstown
Queenstown
the backpackers place, our room, two girls and one guy
no blankets, no pillow and the heater covered with a towel
the noise of the rugby celebrators
our noisy roommate coming in late at night
the ski shop employees friendliness
the shops
the bay/lake
the Thai restaurant and my wonderful meal
the couple screwing on the hood of a car at 6:00 am
the gondola ride up to the top of the mountain in the dark
the view from the top of the mountain of the lake and mountains surrounding me
the bungy jumping spots
the pastries I ate early in the morning
the shop and its owner
the ride leaving Queenstown
the beauty of the mountains, snow, lake, sky

the gorges, valleys, mountains, rivers, creeks, trees, ferns, plants, the roads

journey to Franz Joseph
the Tasmanian coast
the rock cliffs made up of layer slivers of rock
the walk into the natural park area

Franz Joseph
the town
the restaurant
the ice cream cone
the internet computer
the helicopter ride to the glacier
walking on the glacier
the view, the quiet, the snow
the brother and sister couple who road up with me
our dinner and talking that night
my beautiful, though expensive motel room
breakfast the next day

the bus ride to Nelson
the road
the beautiful scenery
the mountains
the water,
waterfalls
the bus driver who ended up my bus driver the next morning to the boat
our stops along the way

Nelson
the pub
the bus driver driving the bus around to help me find a room for the night
the first place being full
the pub
my little room
walking the town that night
how dead it was there
next morning walking around the town as the sun was coming up
the church
the street views to the bay, the mountains, the hills, the forest
the nursery school
the abuse counseling center
the dog school, training center
pastry shop(s)
the internet shop

the ride to the port/dock
watching the loading of the ferry boat to Wellington
the boat
eating a simple meal before boarding the boat
the ride on the boat through the waterway dividing the two islands
the mountains, birds, trees, clouds
my lunch on the boat
sitting on the deck in different spots experiencing the boat ride

arriving in the gigantic bay that Wellington is on the western end of
Neville waiting for my arrival at the bottom of the gangway
his friendly smile
our comfortable talk riding to their home
their home
their beautiful yard
their flowers
them
Neville playing volleyball
the stands I sat on
his friends
our attempt to eat at one of their favorite pubs/restaurants
Wellington
our ride into town
meeting the advertising, architectural, copy shop, design, training people as I wandered around trying to interview people at Sataachi & Sataachi and BBD&O
the streets of Wellington
the wonderful museum Te Pappa
the art gallery
the bus ride around down town
the trolley car ride up and down the hill/mountain
the extreme business of the people on the streets
my sandwich from the little lunch sandwich shop….with beet slices on it.

so many experiences, so many sensory experiences
I was truly high in Wellington
the specially shaped chocolate at the design office
the wonderful Chinese meal
the ride the friendly couple gave me in their Mercedes/Jaguar?
riding the bus out to Neville and Rhona’s home

finding the red architectural school and touring some of it and seeing a couple student work exhibits
riding the bus beyond their home,
finding me way to their home easily by the hospital
buying flowers and wine or candy to say thank you to them.
walking some around their neighborhood, the hillyness of the area
feeling comfortable
the sensations of the bus ride, the walks, the restaurants, the copy shop, interviewing the architect, the landscape architect, the designer

my days were filled with experiences, senses

I truly loved what I was doing nearly every minute, even the frustrating ones.

Healing Journey-David Smith notes

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Healing Journey-David Smith notes

At a certain point he felt the need to test himself in deeper, more distant waters, and he set out alone with a pack on his back to find a new way of life.

After the deaths of my mother, my father, my marriage, my job and my career I needed to end my life. I thought often of physical suicide, ending my physical life , but something inside of me always got me to get up each morning no matter how depressed I felt. I got up and did something. My family and financial lives had been destroyed. At least I thought so then.

Unbeknownst to me my father’s will left money through insurance policies. When my brother, who was given the task to probate our father’s will and estate, explained that I would receive $30-$40,000 dollars after taxes I thought of many things I could do with that money. One that came to mind was to actually take a trip to Europe. As I thought more and more about it the trip became the dream I had been chasing for a few years: The Rome Prize. It is an award given out each year to young architects so that they may take time out and study in Rome. I had applied 3 times and been rejected. Because of my father’s insurance I would be able to fulfill my dream.

When I submitted my proposal for the Prize I had explained that my plan would be to first travel a few months in Europe to experience the cultural differences and then return to the studio that came with the prize in Rome to record my discoveries in order to explore how my learnings might affect my own future design philosophy as an American architect.

I would not have the studio but I could travel around Europe.

“I was never sure what I wanted except that my life had to be different.”

This was true in my thinking also. I really wasn’t as sure as the Rome Prize plan seemed to say. I was escaping. I was venturing out. I was disappearing. My hope, wish, dream was that the 3 month experience would change my pessimistic and seemingly destroyed life for the better.

“he set out alone with a pack on his back to find a new way of life.”

I had planned originally that I would set out alone with a large back pack for clothes and things and a tote bag filled with 100 rolls of film and 50 audio cassette tapes. A few weeks before my departure a designer friend called to ask me to leave earlier and to travel with him and his wife for a week or tour. He pitched the idea of us going to a fabulous graphics exhibit in Dusseldorf as our first real destination. After that we would travel for a week or so and then go our own separate ways: them for 45 days and me for 90 to 100. One of his convincing arguments was that in numbers there could be safety. He rationalized that our 3 heads combined could help us solve problems with not knowing any of the European languages.

I had never traveled alone before without a AAA Triptik or a map and a definite destination.

The only things I had to change were to get an earlier plane ticket and to postpone attending a conference on creativity in Buffalo, New York that I had learned about earlier that year. I figured I would go to that the next year. That I did do and began a series of journeys that have greatly altered my life ever since. That is another life chapter.

“The literature of the human species is rich with stories of transforming change As long as change is possible, there can be hope. And with hope there is energy. The ability to change is our greatest asset.”

I thought for sure that my 1977 tour of Europe would change me and my life. It definitely changed my life. Wandering around Europe for 3 months created an ever-present craving for wandering more and more in my life. From then on I could no longer ever be content simply walking the same path or route over and over again, day after day. Nothing that was repetitive would ever satisfy me again.

In some ways it changed me or at least it gave me a lot of experiences that have greatly affected the perspectives I take in my life from day to day.

“…change means steps into the unknown, and the human animal--all animals--resists change because it is usually frightening. Profound change can require us to abandon our entire infrastructure of memory, history, and belief.”

Ever day was filled with changes. There were changes of food, dress, architecture, location, language, often country-based personality changes, though usually stereotypic there were easy to see, i.e.: differences between the typical German and the typical Swiss or French citizen.

My trip provided me with a continuous array of changes nearly every day. The country I was in. The city or town I was in. Where I slept. Where and what I ate. The words I would need to learn from day to day in order to communicate with the people around me.

Change became a way of life with me. But sitting here now looking back over 25 years I am not sure I changed that much. I believe I began to become aware of who I might really be and began to rely on my unchanging core as a person.

I love variety. I love design, color, art, music yet I do not enjoy seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching the same things day after day. My daily menu of change brought out my love and need for change. It began to change me from the gray young boy and man I had become to the colorful adult I would become.

My daily diet consisted of museums, galleries, studios, exhibits, and tours of the homes of famous people: mostly artists, designers or architects. Added to that was my deliberately choosing to eat in different restaurants at every meal or buying food from different shops to munch on along the way or to spread out as a picnic is some new beautiful area. Then there were the continuously different streets I walked down choosing to only repeat walking on them if I had seen something especially interesting and wanted to return to it or I simply had no other choice because there was no other route available.

Today I still resist walking the same streets. If I have no other choice as I do not when I leave my house and my neighborhood to venture out I will deliberately walk on the other side of the street or wander back and forth across the street or sidewalk, or simply walk on the grass instead of the sidewalk. Anything so that I do not have to repeat any pattern over and over.

I dislike sitting in the same seat in a classroom or meeting room if I have to return to them again and again. I bowl on different bowling alleys each time I return.

Variety is a must, a pattern, an obsession in life. Traveling around Europe alone in 1977 brought out this character trait of mine or at least reinforced it to a very potent level in my conscious mind.

My adventures were tame ones compared to many people who have shared their journeys.

I haven’t climbed Mt Everest though I have traveled to the top of mountains on 6 continents and while trying to climb them have fallen and hurt myself mildly.

I haven’t swam the English Channel though I have traveled across it in a ferry boat, a hovercraft, an Ocean Liner size boat and under it on the special train from London to Paris.

I haven’t wrestled with lions, tigers or bears though I have wandered around zoos in many countries and states and was in a van once that a group of elephants stormed towards.

I haven’t won an Olympic medal for swimming though I have swam in pools in over 40 states and several countries.

I haven’t kayaked great rivers or sailed the seas in a 16 foot sailboat though I have traveled in most of the famous bodies of water of the world and gotten sea sick often even on a dock many times.

I have never parachuted, sky dived or bungi jumped though I have been on Ferris wheels and to the top of site-seeing towers in over 50 countries.

My means of travel to unusual places has usually been my feet. In most cities or towns I have traveled I have ended up walking down streets that many of the citizens or fellow travelers has said, “you walked where alone?” I had because I didn’t know any better.

I am not a famous person. I am not the son of famous people nor a relative of any famous people unless you include Sir Rodderick Dhu (Dhu is Gaelic for Black) who Robbie Burns, the famous Scottish writer, wrote about. He was a distant cousin from Scottish history who was knighted. At the same time his only real profession was that he was a sheep thief.

I have met a few famous people: politicians, writers, artists, architects. I have toured the homes and studios of many famous people.

All this to say that I am not a champion, never have been nor was ever willing to put out the extreme effort to become one. Instead I am a wanderer. One of my most favorite lines from literature is…

“Call me Ishmael. I am a wanderer.”

I am a gray person, one who is seldom noticed. The famous traveling circus company from Montreal Cirque de Soliel depicted people like me in their wonderful show, Quidam. Yet you see my wandering has helped me to unmix or separate out the various colors that form gray into a rainbow that is me, the real me.

My life has not been filled with the great adventures of Lewis and Clark, Magellean, or Captain James Cook. They are more the wanderings of someone with a Euro-Rail pass, a credit line or an ATM card and a back pack for carrying clothes and some small gifts bought along the way.

“Both Jesus and Buddha turned personal experiences in the wilderness into insights for all.”

In my small way I hope this book shares some of my personal experiences wandering around the streets of several countries and states, out into nature on 6 continents from my backyard to the outback surrounding the Uluru rock in such a way that my insights become valuable to you.

My journeys into the wilderness, usually only a mile or two off the marked route, were not equal to Joseph Campbell’s “mythic acts of heroism”. I am and have been someone with the opportunity and the internal desire to wander to experience things I have not seen before.

“The traveler goes out to and returns from a dangerous place, bringing back wisdom for the benefits of others.”

That would satisfy my desire to become famous and to have accomplished something of meaning and value in my life. My hope is that you find my stories and experiences entertaining and that they cause you to stop and think about your own life and what you will do next in it.

My wanderings were not heroic journeys with morals. Yet I believe much can be learned from a simple to minute wandering around in your backyard or a local baseball diamond.

I have never ran down Fujiyama to enact the hero’s descent. I hope to visit the great mountain on another of my wanderings. I have never run a marathon around a volcano in Hawaii though I have walked the beach from Honolulu to Diamond having to weave my way through, over and around beach towels of hundreds of tourists part of the way while still drinking in the beauty of the sky and the ocean’s horizon.

I live by the principle that many to most things are possible and that much of what one person thinks is impossible only sparks another person to look at the same word and to see I’m possible instead. What I do and have done is far from impossible yet many people live their lives thinking that they are.

Instead of being impossible they were simply required focus and my making choices over other options in my life. Instead of beautiful cars, bigger homes, and fancier clothes I have chosen to spend money and use my creative thinking skills to travel and wander.

I am a drop out. I am a drop out from every day life that other people seem to think is the only life to be lived. I dropped out of the corporate life. I dropped out of the 8 to 5, regular job with guaranteed promotions and resulting success. I dropped out of the days filled with activities that other people expect and sometimes demand of you. Instead I wander and wonder. At least I wander. I continue work on wondering more.

My adventures are not exotic with a capital “E” yet they are somewhat. My hope is that through reading my thoughts and stories you will fine that exotic is a state of mind. We can live exotic lives simply being ourselves, living our own lives.

My hope is that my past, present and future insights will be useful to you as you discover and experience your own. Those I hope you share with me some day.

If true contentment comes only from “risk, discipline and dedication to principle” then I probably will never experience it. Yet many times I have experienced what I believed was true contentment.

sitting around a barbe with 4 new Australian friends, walking around Le Corbusier’s Chapel in Ronchamp or Savoy House, strolling through the Temple of Karnak or simply holding my infant son in my arms.

change, inspiration, action and identity

“’’Winning’ does not necessarily mean coming in first.”

Maybe I haven’t become healed through my journeys. Perhaps my healing has not haven’t because I have not pushed myself, put myself into great danger, or have escaped from something life threatening. Yet I did survive cholera and stopped short of falling off a mountain a couple times.

I have not emerged from dropping from the sky under a parachute nor emerged from the oceans deep or the slopes of snow covered mountains in Switzerland or Colorado. Yet I have rounded many corners, climbed up many train steps, and sat along many rivers and streams discovering that each of our lives are exactly that….our lives.

May the following words help you rediscover that your life is your life to live.

family trip notes

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family trip notes

When I was a child my family traveled.

Our trips varied from inside the city to Canada to Mckeesport, Pennsylvania to Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania. The were day trips to a few day trips. Then there were the summer vacations that took us eventually to all 48 mainland states by the summer I was 17.

The summer I turned 18 my mother went back to Scotland. She invited me to go but I turned her down. I didn’t want to travel with my mother. I worked at
Whitehead & Kales, a steel fabrication firm that built railroad cars and created the steel columns and beams for buildings. I worked as a blueprint boy the first summer and as a blueprint boy and junior draftsman the second summer.

We often went to Canada.

I remember our traveling to Niagara Falls to visit Granny Nelson who was living there at the time. I remember we arrived late one night and had to go upstairs in the old boarding house very quietly. I remember the bathroom being down the hall and having to use it in the middle of the night.

I remember staying at Grandma Black’s house, the bathroom with the huge porcelain freestanding metal tub with the feet. The attic where Uncle Wilf had lived and I stayed one trip. The basement and how dark, cold and dirty and filled with cobwebs. Uncle Bob who lived down the hill on the side street from Grandma’s house.

We went to Windsor to visit Uncle Harry and Aunt Maude and to the wedding of her daughter, a beautiful blond who I had a crush on at the age of 5 or 6 and she was 25.

I remember being in old friends of my parents (first apartment days) house and being downstairs in the basement. There I met Chris McGinnis, a fellow worker, perhaps supervisor of my fathers from Timken, the factory who told me about my father’s drawing and cartooning or drawing of funny pictures of employees. Later I would have a client named Chris McGinnis.

O’Neals, old friends of my parents who lived in St. Clair Shores near Gratiot and 8 Mile Road. Who had a son who was killed in a car accident at Hoover and 8 Mile. He was cut in half, middle person on rear bumper trying to push a stalled car.

Hugh and or Packy and ?

One trip to Fairless Hills, Uncle Stan and Auntie Ann, Annabelle, Bobby, Jimmy and Tim (?) We visited Valley Forge that time, along with Princeton. I was probably was 17. It was our last family trip. I hit a curb while out driving with a teenage neighbor of my relatives while driving too fast through a shopping center parking lot.

I remember the trip to Grandma’s when Uncle Stan and Auntie Ann were there. Annabelle was a baby. She fell off the dining room table that trip.

Uncle Jim, batchelor/divorced man actually. Jim, son with a patch over his eye, cancer of the eye.

Uncle Wilf lived with grandma for awhile. He lived with us for awhile. He worked at Ford, RC Mahon, an engineering company on 8 Mile Road that we would drive by to visit Granny Nelson and the Taylors (Dave, Ann and Janet who I had a crush on) Janet looked like Elizabeth Taylor, was very pretty. I remember the time she brought a very religious boy friend to our annual Christmas dinner, he was a minister’s son I believe. She ended up marrying Hal, round face with glasses, smiling most of the time. He later helped us with the legal work on Dad’s will while Jim was the executor.

Grandpa and Grandma married for convenience to support their respective children…his 4 sons and her 1 son and 2 daughters. Grandma was my natural grandmother’s cousin, a Middlemas. One daughter married a Bradshaw--Jim and Billy, athletes, Bolling Green stars and high school stars. Jimmy played for Pittsburgh and Billy signed with the Baltimore Colts went in the Army, played football there and then never played with Balitmore.

Paul and _____. One of them visited Ruth and I at our home on Mark Twain street. He was working for the IRS at the time and in Detroit for training.

Playing “toss” with my baseball cards and losing to Paul and .

Trip to Texas to see Brian at Lackland Air Force Base, basic training for the AF. We drove down to a tiny town in northern Mexico south of San Antonio. When we returned to San Antonio there were giant, flying crickets/locuses flying around the street lights way up in the air and all over the ground. Some flew into the restaurant we ate at. We went across Texas to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Clarabelle, FL “Clean” motel with many beds and huge rooms. Went to eat. Came back to find roaches on the walls. Grandma screaming and complaining. We went down the road a short distance and found an excellent AAA motel.

Florida…alligators, swimmers in famous tourist spot, glass bottom boats, Tampa and old people.

AAA triptiks, visits to the office near 7 mile road shopping area with my mother. Following the highlight triptik pages as we drove.

My father driving on and on and on. Sometimes into the dark. He drove all the way back from south Dakota to Detroit in 19 or so hours. We were out of money. the 3 of us were asleep in the back seat. Brian and Jim up against the two sides and me on a cot set up in the leg/floor space of our 1950 Ford, black.

Trip to the west. Brian was on leave. Grande Canyon, Bryson Canyon, the road with all the gravel and dirt piled in the middle and the trees rubbing, scraping the side of our car as we drove. Long stretches of open landscape in New Mexico and Arizona. California and the Johnson’s house: Richard, Judy, Jean and ? (the one who road with my father to work each morning who was the first to get married…I torn my new pants running around outside in the parking lot with Richard…My mother didn’t know about my pants until she came to see/hear my glee club/class sing in the John Trix auditorium. She was very mad. She repaired my pants with a patch…have never forgotten that.

Western trip we went to Yosemite, Las Vegas and Reno, Tahoe, Hoover Dam/Boulder City.

Trip to Denver to see Jean Smith, librarian then.

Trips to Platte, South Dakota. Nearly drown. Dicky’s great grandmother who lived during the time of the indians. Giving birth in the fields. Me sleeping on a cot on a screen porch.

Mount Rushmore. Wall Drugs

Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon. Climbing the mountain near Dicky’s house falling, sliding down pea size dirt and stopping abruptly at the edge of a very high cliff and turn the corner sharply and suddenly. (Irene-deformed hand…famous Scottish skater, Bert famous Scottish hockey player, got married late in life 40s? 30s? 50s?, he and some friends all claimed to have had sex with the same girl to protect each other against who was the father)

Farmer in gas station…father/dad talked to him for a couple hours while mom, grandma, me and Brian all sat in our hot car.

visiting an old supervisor of my dad’s who lived in the Indianapolis area

Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown

Dam in Tennessee while driving home from Florida. Incomplete interstate highway, detours.

Visiting cousins in Ohio. Going to first movie with just my brothers and cousins. Song I still remember that is played occasionally. I still can remember the time and the words once it begins to play.

My father’s step-sister’s husband who worked for mining company. We visited his strip mine and saw the giant machine/shovel that he was responsible for driving/working.

Hoffman (Mary) the other step-sister. 2 boys, both blonde, one named Paul, tax man.

Maine trip, Montreal, kids singing along with Elvis on juke box but not speaking English.

Ottawa, government buildings

New York…Empire State Building tour, Statue of Liberty, Today Show building, Rockefeller Center.

Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell and historic buildings.

Each Day a Journey

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Each Day a Journey

When you wake up is the day you are about to experience going to be a journey, a wandering, a vacation or a guided tour?

The choice is yours.

Yes outside influences can greatly impact your choices. Still you have more choices than you may realize or have developed a habit of making.

You say you have to work. You have to work to pay bills. Those bills can include paying for a house for your family, clothes, food, education, recreation, just for the fun you want to have. Yet are they bills or the expense you are required to pay to fulfill your choices.

House payments, car payments, credit card payments, school payments all are the results of choices you and I have made. If you choose to drive an expensive car your payments will be large and long. If you choose to drive an older car that can easily be maintained your payments will be smaller over a shorter period. In both cases the choice was yours.

Ask yourself why you have a car or you believe you have to have a car?

transportation
image
social acceptance
fun
ego
?

Rank these in the order of importance to you.

If transportation is your answer, is having your own expensive vehicle really necessary for you to get where you need to go? Probably not. If it feels nice to drive in a comfortable, beautiful, highly dependable car than it is not necessarily transportation that is your highest ranking determination. What other forms of transportation are available to you to get you where you need or choose to want to go?

walking
bicycle
motorcycle
motorbike
city bus
subway
taxi
friends
scooter
horse
car pooling
truck
tank
ox cart

The city of Copenhagen, Denmark is moving towards having bicycle only days each week and month to help cut down pollution, noise, stress and accidents and deaths on their roads. In Chennai, India many people walked everywhere, many others ride city busses, or on oxen and still the streets are filled with vehicles: cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles. In Stratford-on-Avon most people walk everywhere.

What are the choices you make in your life and how do they affect all the other choices you make?

You do choose to wear trendy clothing, simply comfortable clothing you have had for years, simply the most economic clothing or clothing you make by hand?

Do you prefer to eat in fashionable, latest and most popular restaurants that may be pricey, modest priced restaurants, good “ole” home cooking places, fast food restaurants or to make your own meals at home?

Do you read library books, borrow books from friends, buy used books or only buy brand new hardback books?

Do you use things for years, continually have things repaired to stretch their use lives, or do you buy only the latest and newest of everything?

Do you dream about traveling the world? Do you go on lots of tours, cruises and expensive vacations? Do you go to relatives’ homes or share accommodations with relatives at resorts or state parks? Do you camp in a trailer or tent?

All of these are possible choices.

Each set or category of choices may greatly affect the other choices you want to or can make.

For me I choice to maintain the two cars I have and have the dealership check them out periodically. My goal is to see the odometers on each reach over 300,000 miles and for both of them to have “historic plates” on them. Yes I enjoy seeing, riding and on rare occasion driving very nice and brand new cars. I choose not to spend my money and the effort necessary to accumulate the money to pay for them.

I enjoy eating. My bathroom scales and the sizes printed on the labels of my clothes clearly demonstrate that. On occasion I will eat at an expensive restaurant for the experience or in order to spend time with a particular group of friends. Mostly I eat in average to modest or very low priced restaurants or a selected few fast food or chain restaurants.

I own a modest home that I continually work on redesigning to suit me. I have designed and love the design of beautiful homes whether small, medium, large or castle size. But I choose not to have to earn the money through the necessary effort to pay for a larger or grander home.

I love to travel. I have been in over 56 countries and 49 states. My desire and plan is to travel to another 40, 50, or more countries and to Alaska (my fiftieth state to visit) for pleasure, to S.P.R.E.A.D. creative thinking and to visit many of those I have visited already many times again during my life to come.

These are choices I have made or choose to make.

I attempt to analyze my choices before I go ahead with them to verify that one choice is not going to negatively affect another potential choice, or to test out if I am willing to give up some of one for the pleasure of more of another.

That is how I have chosen to design my life travels for many years.

This chapter could also cover daily travels including all types/aspects: family, work, friends, personal, fun, relaxation, educational, etc.

it might cover weekly travels

week day travels that make weekend travels

weekend travels that help improve the quality of week day travels

vacations

months travels that prepare us for future week, month travels

monthly travels that prepare us for the future

yearly travels that prepare us for the future.

past, present, future versions of all of these.

Crichton Similarities

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Crichton Similarities

TRAVELS by Michael Crichton

Dan Hope told me about this book then sent me a quote from it in an email.

The following are notes from TRAVELS
1988

PREFACE

For many years I traveled for myself alone. I refused to write about my trips, or even to plan them with any useful purpose.

I felt a real need for rejuvenation, for experiences that would take me away from things I usually did, the life I usually led.

In my everyday life, I often felt a stifling awareness of the purpose behind e3verything I did. Every book I read, every movie I saw, every lunch and dinner I attended seemed to have a reason behind it. From time to time, I felt the urge to do something for no reason at all.

I conceived these trips as vacations - as respites from my ongoing life but that wasn’t how they turned out. Eventually, I realized that many of the most important changes in my life had come about because of my travel experiences.

For however tame when compared with the excursions of real adventurers, these trips were genuine adventures for me. I struggled with my fears and limitations, and I learned whatever I was able to learn.

WRITING IS HOW YOU MAKE THE EXPERIENCE YOUR OWN, HOW YOU EXPLORE WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU, HOW YOU COME TO POSSESS IT, AND ULTIMATELY RELEASE IT.

I WAS FASCINATED TO SEE HOW MUCH I COULD WRITE WITHOUT REFERENCE TO MY NOTEBOOKS.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Strippd of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes -- with all this take away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have.

WESTERN MAN IS SO SURROUNDED BY IDEAS, SO BOMBARDED WITH OPINIONS, CONCEPTS, AND INFORMATION STRUCTURES OF ALL SORTS, THAT IT BECOMES DIFFICULT TO EXPERIENCE ANYTHING WITHOUT THE INTERVENING FILTER OF THESE STRUCTURES. AND THE NATURAL WORLD--OUR TRADITIONAL SOURCE OF DIRECT INSIGHTS --IS RAPIDLY DISAPPEARING.

It’s no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about.

I traveled because I had lost my bearings in my everyday life.

BANGKOK

“I had traveled before. I had traveled all my life. My parents were inveterate travelers, and they took their kids with them (at least me most of the time).

By the time I graduated from high school, I had been to forty-eight states to Canada and Mexico…”

I entered the museums of Paris and Amsterdam…”

If I was in a city where an important museum was closed, I stayed an extra day. I saw everything. I ate everything. I experienced everything. In Egypt, I climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops, went inside it,…

Nothing was too small or too distant to escape my inspection; it was never too hot or too buggy; if there was any questions about it, I saw it. In (Barcelona) I sought out obscure apartment buildings that represented the early work of Antonio Gaudi; in France, I went down a checklist of buildings by Le Corbusier.”

he was “loaded down with guidebooks and commentaries”

I’ve been there. I knew my way around. I was comfortable with different languages, different currencies. My passport and luggage were suitably battered. I could enter a strange city, find a hotel, speak enough of the language to get along, to be at ease.

I was an accomplished traveler.

When I hit my doldrums, I decided I had better get moving.

There are definitely some distinct similarities, parallels between Crichton’s traveling and mine.

When I returned in 1977 to Palm Beach, Florida I had been to 22 new countries, visited most of the famous museums, galleries and architectural sites: ancient, historic and contemporary. I had been in famous homes, buildings, palaces, some castles, seen Shakespeare’s, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Mille, Sebalius, Saarinen’s and Munch’s homes.

I had learned how to get around using a variety of strategies in foreign countries, at least European. I had become reasonable comfortable being in countries that spoken different languages than mine, had different currencies and customs and foods.

My passport was very well stamped and my backpack had many frequent flier and rail miles on it.

“I could then enter a new city, find a place to stay, find restaurants, museums, parks, and get along with a little knowledge of the language.

“I had become an accomplished ‘foreign’ traveler.” My parents had already taught me to be an accomplished American traveler.

Before I had finished my first long trip I had already decided to return the next summer to spend a month to 5 weeks traveling around Great Britain. During the next 9 months I met my beautiful wife and soul mate who joined me on the next trip.

describe arrivals and departures to and from various cities I have traveled to.

describe the views from my hotel, motel, pension, B&B rooms: Nice, London, Paris, Istanbul, Cairo, Luxor, etc…..

taxi rides

bus rides

limos

hitchhiking: France, Rome

hotels, pensions, B&B, hosts’ homes

seldom do I travel with a guidebook in hand
I travel to experience
sometimes I check out and plan things

“I wandered, enjoying all the street activity.”

the streets, shops, bookstores, markets, bus stations, train stations, airports have taught me or suggested to me much about the countries and the people in general

vignettes of life everywhere

excited, glory, joy, great feelings of joy to depression, moodiness, fear

the boats in Venice at dawn…delivering…the Coke boat

the vast varieties of food: vegetables, fruits, candies, pastries, clothing, things: flea markets, weekly/monthly street markets, along the road, commercial areas, wholesale, discount, tourist,

getting sick to my stomach in Cairo’s market.
walking the markets in Istanbul with Esra

the English and Italian markets with Merry

pattern of exploration, wandering, searching, discovering, learning

customs, celebrations

Cortona…the soccer win…parade up and down the mountain

Queenstown…the rugby win

our dinner in Johannesburg

our barbeques brai’s at Kobus’

the beer garden in Munchen

the fish and chips in front of the Italian restaurant in Canterbury

UXMAL p171

I felt a sort of conspiracy among the audience, a conspiracy not to acknowledge the depth of the ignorance.

I love watching sunrises.
I love watching the sun awaken a city, a beach, a countryside.
I love it because there are no human noises. Just simply the sounds of nature beginning another day.

It could be San Marco Square in Venice. It could be an all white neighborhood in Pretoria. It could be the streets of Alice Springs and I am waiting for my tour bus to pick me up. I am standing looking completely around, 360 degrees. I am seeing Alice Springs in the early light. Last night when I arrived from Uluru it was pitch black. Now I can see the rim of hills that mostly surround the town called Alice.

what experts cannot easily read, guidebooks glibly describe and summarize

“Nobody on vacation wants to walk though a great ruined city and be told, ‘We know nothing about this place.’” (We know nothing….Private Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes)

The closer one looks at history, the less coherent it becomes.

…as I watched the morning sun spread across the face of the ancient city.

Soon enough I, too, clutched my guidebook and walked through the ruins of Uxmal, pretending that I understood far more than I did.

Sean Connery

Say what you mean and get on with it

He takes pleasure in all his aspects, all his appetites.

“You should always tell the truth, because if you tell the truth you make it the other person’s problem.”--SC

Sean seems to life in a kind of present moment, responding to events with an unaffected immediacy that disregards the past and the future.

He always tells the truth as he sees it at the moment, and if somebody doesn’t like it, it’s their problem.

His fresh view allows him to reach some surprising conclusions.

The question was always there to be asked. It was just that no one had asked it.

Every year 60,000 people die in auto accients
7 die from snake bites

we do not fear cars or driving
we fear snakes

“Although we retrace our route exactly, I am surprised by how different the views appear on the way back. In part, this is a standard trekker’s discovery: any route looks different going and coming.”

“I realized then that I had defined myself too narrowly.”

“It is easy to become anxious atop the pyramid, for I am looking at extensive ruins that no one understands.”

Pyramid of the Magician in the Yucatan jungle.

Courage is a Three Letter Word

2009-12-05T08:03:00.002-08:00

notes from

Courage is a Three Letter Word
by Walter Anderson
Parade Magazine Editor

“…when you are living with pain optimism seems impossible.”

“Even the most horrible experience can be big with blessings.”

Who Am I?
Do I Belong?
Must I Worry?
What if I make a mistake?
Why am I so angry?
Can I begin again?
When must I say good-bye?
Why me?
Am I ready?

“Just as the bod held the jade stone and turned it in his hand day after day, so you should turn the stories you’re reading. Turn them, weigh them, consider them, make them a part of you.” p. 16

“Our challenge is to live with anxiety, to remind ourselves that it is an asset to our well-being. It can be our ally.”

to gain the most from this book, I recommend that you underline paragraphs, write notes in the margins, fold pages that you find particularly meaningful, live this book with me.

“What will I do when they find out I’m me?”

Mairead Corrigan Maquire

her emphasis
her intensity
her passion
her dedication
her commitment

3 things determine who we are.
heredity
environment
our response to both

“You are the only you who will ever live.”

“There has never been anyone quite like you, or me.”

“I am somebody. I am not part of someone else.”

heredity is our potential
environment is our opportunity

we have free will

he listened before he explained, he responded, he answered, he asked

hope dwells on the possible
true hope recognizes that something exists, happened and seeks to learn from it, conquer it.

we each to be free to go our own way.

my goal is to share my experiences, my learnings, my fears, concerns, loves…

“Sometimes, we can confuse who we are with what we own, we seek recognition or self-esteem in an object or a possession.”

“HALEY

his inability to “feel” the torment slaves must have experienced as they lay trapped in chains aboard wooden ships heading to strange new lands.”

Friday, March 29, 2002

“Can anyone be known that quickly?”

“How many years, how many thousands of intense hours, has it take psychiatrists to ‘know’ their patients--sometimes, after all that, only to be wrong.”

“What we really respond to when meeting someone else is the degree of interest the other person shows in us.”

Harry, Ed Wollenweber, Neal and Barbara, their home, their land, their lives

I love when someone tells us our opinion matters.

Bill Shephard did that yesterday when we spoke about me becoming the next Extending Session Coordinator. He compliment me on how I approached being a Covener and the effort I put into being one.
Mortimer Levitt, successful shirt manufacturer and write about CLASS

“Life has problems and some are tragic.

“the ability to think of others instead of being consumed by ourselves

ask questions because you are really interested in them.

we share our lives with others
we can choose to share our lives with others

a community, a group of two

Prince Michael of Greece
Sultana, History, My Sister

“all of us need to be accepted. We all want to belong.”
?????
‘everyone wants to be proud, and we need to find the things that make us proud.”

“What will I do when they find out I’m me?”
John Glenn

The famous worry. They have anxiety.

“Worry is an indication that we care about something we consider important.”

we often can eliminate a large number of worries simply by writing them down.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

when we ask that often our anxieties disappear or simply lessen

1st recognize fears, anxieties
2nd accept that they exist
3rd generate lists of how to deal with them
4th act in some small way

study for rather than worry about a test
work at your preparation rather than worry about screwing up

condition yourself for the worst

our lives are filled with unforeseen events

The unknown about anything is what frightens you.

MISTAKE--FOUR KINDS “S-L-I-P”

MISTAKES OF SIMILARITY responding to familiar signals that existed in previous but not the current conditions….driving a particular way not noticing that it was the old way not the new way you needed to drive

MISTAKES OF LAPSE simply a lapse of memory, forgot what you went in a room or up the stairs for

MISTAKES OF IGNORANCE we know we don’t know but we act anyway

MISTAKES OF PERCEPTION we think we know but we don’t, we mistakenly assume

MISTAKE OF EGO, ARROGANCE, CONCEIT

to succeed we must be prepared to fail
to succeed we must be willing to fail

life after all is trial and error

isn’t success almost always the last of a string of failed attempts to get it right?

If we did not test,
did not experiment,
did not try,
did not flub,
we would not grow.

“I never felt I was my work.”
Sherry Lansing, actress, Paramount President, first woman in such a role

don’t dwell on what went wrong ANALYZE, LEARN, MOVE ON

“Life is the sound of a baby crying, of autumn leaves rustling, it’s the scent of talcum, pine, frying bacon and freshly turned earth, it’s the feel of velvet ad moist skin and sand, it’s the taste of salt, chocolate and lemon; it’s blues, reds, greens, yellows in a billion shapes and textures. it’s a smile, a frown and,
sometimes,
a tear.”

if you do nothing, you don’t make mistakes
if you don’t make mistakes, you do nothing.

RESPONSIBILITY
INSIGHT
PERSPECTIVE

RESPONSIBILITY` accept responsibility for your errors, mistakes

INSIGHT separate yourself from the error, study it, learn
from it and move on

PERSPECTIVE ask what is the worst thing that can happen?

REST
IN
PEACE

compare is it a tragedy or a disappointment?

enjoy the day
stay in the game

examine your fear
find it real
take action

accept responsibility
examine the situation
seek, find, create solutions

focus on finding, collecting and creating solutions

Sunday, March 31, 2002

Chapter 6 Why Am I so Angry?

“He was absolutely brilliant. He came from the poorest of the poor families. As a child he had to stuff newspaper in his shoes to cover the holes in his shoes. He went to school thirteen years at night to become a lawyer and an accountant and a tax expert. He was fiercely determined to move ahead.”
author Barbara Goldsmith describing her father Joseph I. Lubin

“I know of no self-made man who can perceive his own children to be as resilient, as tough, as persistent as he is.”

How can you be grateful for what you have always have?

Anger is the child of frustration. We are not born angry. We learn it--almost immediately.

Anger gets things done. It’s the energy that inspires creative acts.

3 A’s of Anger

1. Admit it
2. Analyze it
3. Answer it (deal with it)

4. Advance because of it

Monday, April 1, 2002

Can I begin again?
Can I try something different or am I imprisoned by my past,
by my failures, by others, by the world around me?
Must I always be what I am?
Can I really be more?
Can I begin again?

first ask yourself…

What do I really want to do or be?

then make yourself a promise…

I will not look over my shoulder.
I will use whatever I have learned, while not dwelling on mistakes I have made.

use your own experience
focus on today

“I’m not finished! There’s more I am going to do.”

Chennai Arrival

2009-12-05T08:03:00.001-08:00

Chennai Arrival

It wasn't a dark and stormy night yet it was scary.

I was arriving in Chennai, India for the very first time. I had just flown from
rebel-racked Colombo, Sri Lanka where have of their commercial airline had been blown up by rebels a week before I arrived there to do my first day-long creativity session in Sri Lanka. I had been in contact with my connection in India for weeks about my arrival in Chennai. The day or two before he had confirmed that he would meet me at the airport when I arrived.

Until that afternoon I had never been in India. Oh I had seen many photos, television shows and movies about India but I really wasn't prepared for what I was about to experience.

I picked up my bags, in tact, surprise, surprise, based on negative input I had gotten from other international travelers. I got through the customs and visa entry stands and was walking out of the airport terminal. There in front of me was a football stadium size crowd of people. Half of them were taxi drivers yelling for my business. As I weaved through the mass of yelling people, pushing and shoving I scanned the signs being wavied at each of the arriving passengers. I was hoping one of the had my name on it. Not one.

I had no idea what my contact, Prakash looked like. I had sent him photographs of me via post and email over the past couple years that we had been talking about me coming to India to present for one of his clients.

No one in front of me looked like they knew me. Nearly all of them, hundreds and hundreds were trying to get me to ride in their cab. I got past the crowd trying to regain my composure and to lessen the developing stress level so I could figure out what I was going to do.

Several worst case scenarios ran through my mind as I walked in and out of the entrance to the terminal trying to figure out where the phones were, where the ATMs were, where were the wonderful western-type banks of hotel courtesy phones to sue to arrange for a hotel in case Prakash didn't show up after all.

I had his phone number. Finally after several attempts I found a phone. Then I had to find where I could get coins to use in it. The ATM machine only provided large bills that the phones would not take.

The phone rang in Prakash's office. His secretary answered and said he was out and hung up on me.

Frustrattion, stress and tension were growing and growing. I decided to walk back to the terminal entrance one more time and to scan the crowded of desperately promoting taxi drivers one more time for Prakash or anyone who could be Prakash.

I put my backpack and shoulder bag down looked up and there was his smiling face, or at least a smiling face of a dignified looking Indian gentleman. Who in a moment said my name.

How sweet that suddenly sounded.

I then discovered that he was not late at all. I was early. The time I gave him for my arrival was based on Sri Lankan time not Eastern Indian time. The time zones are 30 minutes not one hour different.

When you travel be sure when you talk about time you verify that you are talking about the same time and time zones as the other person.

Baggage, Luggage, Sacks and Back Packs

2009-12-05T08:02:00.001-08:00

Baggage, Luggage, Sacks and Back Packs

“My god they must be carrying refrigerators,
king size beds and sofas in those boxes.”

That’s what I thought when I was standing in the line at the Chennai, India Airport to check in for Air Emirates, the famous Saudi Arabian airline. All around me were people in what I understood to be traditional dress from the Arab countries. Each couple or large family were standing behind airport carts with huge boxes. I mean huge. So large they could be rented as one room apartments. I was faithfully, obligingly, quietly standing in my line ever trying to radiate an image of don’t notice me with my one backpack and a handbag.

Don’t notice me? I was the only westerner. The only one wearing hiking boots. The only one with a full beard, wearing typical western traveler clothes and a toting a western back pack.

What people carry with them when they travel is quite diverse. What people carry with them through life is also quite diverse. Years ago I saw a television show featuring Barbara de Angelis, an author and motivational speaker. In her introduction she walked out on stage after a powerful and warm introduction briefly began he presentation and suddenly stopped saying she needed to bring out her visual aids. The attractive, petit, always smiling, brunette then walked behind the curtain still talking all the way behind the curtain, talking about what people carry with them on their trips through life. Suddenly she reappeared pulling a gigantic train station type cart filled with piles of luggage, what she called the baggage of life we carry with us. Her wonderfully graphic, 3 dimensional metaphor drove home her next points beautifully.

When you prepare to travel what do you carry with you?

Do you carry several bags of varying sizes? Do you carry one or two huge trunks? Do you carry a matched set of handsome, designer style luggage: solid color, leather, plaid or silver metal? Do you carry a single backpack?

We can spend time on all the details about various forms of travel containers but that is not my purpose for this metaphor or analogy. How you pack. How you carry. What you bring. Why you bring what you bring. All of these say much about you and your life travels.

A highly organized person of course will carry only what they definitely or even absolutely need. They will pre-think, preplan and pre-analyze the contents of their luggage. They will make sure all the individual pieces have wheels, handles or straps and are easily carried or toted. They may even test out the packed bags to make sure they can truly carry them.

A wanderer will throw some things into a backpack or soft nylon zipper bag and be on their way, perhaps taking a few things too many just in case they will need them.

A tour person will probably pack most of their closest and kitchen cabinets. I remember when Merry, Jessica and I were leaving for a summer in Italy. I was going to be teaching for the University of Georgia Cortona, Italy study abroad program and we were going to be gone for about 3 months. We would be traveling the first 2 weeks in the Netherlands and Italy by plane, train and bus moving from hotel to hotel and a regular basis. Once the artistic mob, 180 plus or minus students, faculty and family members strong, arrived in Cortona at the end of the second week we would be living in a previously unseen apartment for 6 weeks before then traveling again for about 10 days by bus in central, eastern and northeastern Italy and finally then the three of us would travel back by train through Switzerland and Germany to the Netherlands to travel on our own for two weeks.

While I watched Merry pre-pack and talk about what she was taking it seemed like our little two bedroom apartment in Married Housing would be left bare because we were taking everything plus many borrowed things. The reasoning? We were going to be living somewhere else, not knowing what the living conditions would be really like, for 10 to 11 weeks. Merry decided to be completely prepared with varied clothing suitable for any type of event and weather. She always loved a cup of coffee in the morning to enter the day with. She loved natural blend teas of varying mixtures and flavors. She was an excellent and highly creative cook, more like a chef and had to take her favorite pots, pans and utensils.

I now remember why seeing her actually pack all that she brought did not create a marital problem. I wasn’t home during the last 2 or 3 days before our little family flew to Amsterdam. I had been given an opportunity to participate in a cutting edge super-learning and teaching workshop and was sleeping at a friend of ours’ apartment each night in Atlanta. Merry did all the packing alone. An issue that became “old baggage” itself later in our marriage when we went through a difficult in our relationship after 17 years.

Now I have given you some information and a couple examples of how travelers pack for their life travels. Why is this an important concern? Or, How might it be?

First, because we have varied life travel styles we also have varied ways of how we decide what to take along with us and how we will package our things. I am almost tempted to share an old George Carlin routine about “Stuff”. Instead I highly recommend you find an old 33 rpm record, audio or video tape or CD with the routine on it and listen to it, especially if you are about to travel. In that case I recommend you listen to it several times. Besides being very funny, bizzare type of funny Carlin also includes some very insightful wisdom in his routine.

Second, it is important to prepare whether precisely in a highly detailed manner or loosely we need to take into consideration what we have planned to do, what no doubt can happen, what possibly will happen and what might happen that we can not imagine could ever happen. Whether you are thinking about a vacation a few hundred miles away or completely around the world experience leading to wisdom tells us to prepare, make ready, so that we will not experience disaster while we travel. Whether you are thinking about how you will travel through the next 5, 10 or 20 years of your career or marriage up to your entire working life until you are in your 80s or older it is beneficial to take time to prepare what you are taking with you along the way.

“He saved everything. He had every cancelled check, every bank statement, every ticket stub, coupon, airline or train ticket. He had every heavily wrinkled playbook or theatre program.” My father was like that so were the fathers of several of my friends. When we begin to sort through the “baggage, luggage, sacks and backpacks” that our parents leave behind when they die we often learn things about them that we never knew and begin to get glimpses into ourselves and our own lives. Recently while in Florida to attend and help celebrate my son’s wedding I spent time 3 to 4 hours each with two long before friends. One had been my employer and friend. The other a fellow employee and friend. During our travels down memory lane either that morning or afternoon separately each of them made statements about their fathers and what they had carried through their lives.

I believe what we pack, how we pack, what we keep and what we store in our lives tells much about us. Some of us continue the habits, consciously or subconsciously learned from our parents. Others create our own patterns and habits. Me I usually repeatedly pile things in seemingly logical or meaningful piles, until they either cover every horizontal surface or begin to fall over into chaos. Then I put the piles into boxes. Then I begin to pile the boxes until to begin to fall over. Then I begin to fill up rooms, closets, attics, garages and such. Then every so often I become a fanatic about surge and purge and begin to organize and throw out what I then no longer believe I need or no longer have a deep attachment with.

“baggage, luggage, sacks and backpacks”

who, what, when, where, why, how

traveling
journey, wandering, trips or tours

metaphorically traveling through life

Barbara de Angelis’ metaphor and analogy

A Weekend of Journeys

2009-12-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

Saturday, March 30, 2002

A Weekend of Journeys

I journeyed this morning in my mind, soul and heart

I journeyed out onto my deck through the sliding glass door watching the birds feeding and to enjoy the beauty of my daffodils and pansies.

I journeyed in my mind while I was reading COURAGE IS A THREE LETTER WORD by Walter Anderson, editor of Parade magazine.

I journeyed on my computer over the internet

Now I am going off to journey on the wet streets of my area of Athens for exercise and to let my mind freshen up and wander some.

Off once again to wander.

my journey took me to inspect my post office box. Often it contains messages from around the world or simply local bills and advertisements.

Then I wandered to the Kroger parking lot. Parked my car and went awandering on foot through a neighborhood I hadn’t been in in a long time. I did the drawings for a deck for a friend who lived there many years ago. It was a peaceful stroll up and down fairly steep hills. The trees and shrubs were in bloom and leafing. A couple dogs did their barking job. Then I stopped and heard a creek or stream in the woods behind the homes on the valley side of the road. I hadn’t known that there was a stream there. I knew I was not far from the river. Off I wandered until I found a street that seemed to lead to houses I could just barely see in the woods in the distance. As I got towards the bottom of the street I could easily see that it became a dead end quickly after it turned to the left at the bottom of the hill. I was approached by a new furry friend, a yellow brown puppy who came up to excitedly say hello to me. It tagged along with me as I walked towards the end of the dead end. Off to my right I could strongly here a shoals or waterfall. Sure enough about 200 feet into the foots about 10 feet down from my elevation was an outcropping of very large rocks/boulders with water flowing through and over them making that beautiful sound I love so much. I just stood there listening, enjoying, dreaming about how I would love to own such land and build a house on it over or next to a waterfall.

After enjoying the shoals and its wonderful sound for a while I turned to complete my journey. There before me was a fairly steep road leading back towards the main road I am come in off of. I hadn’t realized how far down I had gone until I had to walk up that steep street.

My exercise journey complete I returned to the Kroger shopping center and decided to go on a stomach journey, to eat in the small Chinese restaurant. I had the daily buffet. Nothing fancy but tasty. The customers were mostly Spanish speaking, except for me. An international journey. I hadn’t expected that. An egg roll, egg drop soup, egg foo young and small portions of other Chinese dishes: thin noodles and vegetables, thick noodles with soy sauce and pieces of meat and vegetables. The wall beside my table has a large photo of a portion of the famous Wall of China. Around me was spoken a mixture of Spanish, English and Chinese.

My typical Saturday morning journey once again provided many sensory experiences. The same happens whether I am in Hobart, Tasmania, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Copenhagen, Denmark or Columbus, Georgia. The world is filled with so much we can enjoy with our senses.

A couple days ago was my daughter and her husband’s 4th anniversary so while I was in the Kroger shopping for a couple needed items for the house I also bought some flowers and two celebration cards: one anniversary and one birthday. Jessica turns 30 next Saturday, April 5th and I will be wandering in Tempe, Arizona and not Georgia then.

eyes
I see color: yellow, greens, reds, purples, blues, violets, browns, grays, whites and so many that make up the flowers, trees, birds, my deck and other things I can enjoy simply by raising my eyes from the computer screen and glancing out the sliding screen door that is between me, my deck and the backyard. In the room around me are so many shapes, colors, textures, stuff from my trips, CDs all piled up, jamming the cubby hole like spaces in the wood cabinet in front of me against the wall. On the wall is a Mexican bedspread I brought back from San Antonio, Texas. Hanging from the top of it are 20 Christmas ornaments angels, all completely different and unique. Below them are four prints of watercolor sketches from canal views in Copenhagen, a poster from Arcosanti and one of an Australian Aboriginal painting. To my left and partially behind me is another wood cabinet with 12 drawers. It is waist high. On top of it are a mixed collection of things I have brought back from trips outside of the U.S. from my 2001 Wandering Around the World trip or single trips to South Africa or Turkey.

nose
I am surround by the strong smell of an Arm & Hammer carpet freshener. Smells like perfume that old women tend to wear. It is extremely strong. I just sprinkled it and will let it sit for a couple hours and then I will vacuum the carpet, which will pick up some of the dust and dirt and lighten the smell.

ears
road sounds
birds
lawn mowers
my fingers hitting the keys of the lap top
washing machine and clothes dryer I have running

It truly is Saturday. I can tell by the sounds, smells and sights.

When we use all our senses we can enjoy our travels so much more.

movements
slight wind in parts of the tree tops out in the backyard
the pendulum on the clock from Brian and Rosalie
the wind toys I brought back at Thanksgiving from Sedona
ever so slightly the Soleri bells
chimes from sister-in-law Pat
the slight breeze I can feel on my feet and cheek

living in this sensory world is so much more fun than an abstract, analytical one.