I have had more opportunity in my lifetime than most people could ever imagine.
I am not so foolish to think that I earned all of it. I know it has a lot to do with a very long string of decisions by generations ahead of me. Essentially, I’ve been lucky. There are two opportunities that I’ve had that I did not take and always wonder about:
1. A lifetime ago I was a college student studying Wildlife Biology in western Montana – a dream for many people. Doing field level biology work for a living is a privilege that many people actually pay to perform because there are very few opportunities to make a living, and most field biologists live a sort of country rockstar existence for many years by couch surfing, living out of vehicles, and camping under the stars. It was an ideal lifestyle for me.
Paying jobs are scarce, and I went up against Ph.D’s for $7/hour field jobs where 200-300 people applied. I worked on field studies all over the western US and saw some truly amazing things. One summer I was offered a very low paying job (but it paid!) with the Nature Conservancy as their primary field agent for a 12,000 acre site in Montana. It was a dream job, once-in-a-lifetime gig for people with a skill set that nobody gives a shit about. But, it didn’t pay enough. I had to pass.
After all, I had bills to pay. I had to make a certain amount of money. I had to start maturing and stop living out of my truck and eating pop-tarts 4 times per day. I had debt. I had made promises.
Instead, I took my old job on a warehouse loading dock that paid well and killed me silently for a year. This was an important lesson that illustrated that no skill applied to something economically viable can earn a living while high skill at something nobody cares about can get you further in debt if you’re still living within the Economic Grid.
2. In between field jobs, I remodeled houses with a one-eyed crazy man on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. I spent a winter hand digging a septic ditch for him when things were slow. “I can either rent a ditchwitch or hire you,” he told me. I needed the money.
At this point, I had a family and needed to make money. I had made promises. I had debt from years of little income. As the cold rain filled the ditch with water as I dug, my hands broke open and bleed everyday. I thought God was punishing me.
At the end of the winter, I said, “Fuck it! I’m joining the military.” I was sick of living on couches and being broke. I was 26 years old, and I had bills to pay. I had promises to keep. I had debt that had to be paid.
My boss asked me not to join the military (he had lost his eye in the Army). He told me I was making a mistake and asked me to build a cabin for him. He’d front the lot and material, and I would build through the summer. At the end, we’d sell the cabin and do it again. He was essentially offering me a trade that wouldn’t pay until we succeeded.
I declined the one-eyed man’s request. I had bills to pay. I had made promises. I had debt.
Instead I went to boot camp then deployed for 11 months. I was gone for almost two years continuously before I slept in my own bed for two weeks straight. That lead to more deployment that quickly became 5 years, then 10, then 12…
I thought God was punishing me every time I went to watch after being up for 30+ hours just to listen to some junior officer spout some bullshit in the middle of the night.
But, I’ve been all over the world, and seen amazing things that I can’t even describe. I’ve learned things that I never would have even contemplated. I guess you call this “cognitive dissonance.”
What’s the lesson? Get off the Grid. Debt is about the worst reason to not do something, yet when you don’t know better it is all-consuming. Live without debt. I still believe it’s the first step to opting out of this failed monetary system that convinces people they need to suppress passion, artistry, and skill for the sake of money. Debt is the lubricant of this machine.
Right now we don’t need loading dock workers and enlisted grunts. Well, unless that’s really what you want to do. There’s a different way to pay dues that involves tapping your potential and your purpose. It’s a hard lesson, but I’ve learned it.
At this point, I want to be a provider of opportunity.
Here’s what I was listening to when I wrote this:
I wonder if he’s ever had promises to keep. I wonder if he’s ever had debt.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Amen–don’t get in debt in the first place, whichmeans don’t go to a fancy university unless they’re giving you the money outright or giving you a job to earn your way. The Counterculture was all about cash and cash only.
Yesterday I was kept sane by the thought that somewhere here in New Mexico there is a person living in a yurt, off the grid, lighting a candle for all us humans stuck in the system.
I’m just wondering…
Did you go to The Evergreen State College as I did?
Nice music, and I bet he made a lot of sacrifices to get that good. Takes a lot of time, even when you’re a great talent. If you don’t know who he is, check out Tommy Emmanuel on Youtube, one of the true greats, he started when he was five.
It seems like we can all look back and see opportunities we wonder about, if we’d only taken them. Great post, and lots to think about.
Great post, Tommy. I had a couple opportunities like the ones you mentioned, made possible by generations-long chains of causality: One was grad school in England working with a really great professor; another was a graduate program here for a degree in Geography, which would have let me do similar field work to the kind you mention. My life would probably be very different, but it would have meant taking on a lot of debt, so I didn’t.
This is an interesting exercise…I’m looking back at two key opportunities that I passed up – both were “organic” in that they were part of a natural expression/progression in my life. And both had some connection to financial fear, as in not being able to make enough money to make it work.
The first opportunity came about in art school. My teachers convinced my parents to send me as I was quite talented so they say. I LOVEd it! But one day on the drive home from the Art Institute my dad had “the discussion” with me. It went something like this…”don’t get any big ideas about your art…artists don’t make any money…and you don’t want to spend your life without nice things. You need to get into business like me…..”. I was crushed…and never finished art school.
The second opportunity was to be Mrs. Chuck XXX, leave Miami of Ohio in my junior year and run away with my LOVEr and live in the woods of North Carolina doing macrame and sewing, growing things, playing guitar and LOVING life while he finished Forestry school. But I could’t face my dad who surely would have killed me for wasting a good college education (marketing major of course) and marrying a man who was surely going to be poor.
Both times I passed up LOVE and in the passings ended up on a very different course.
I got that excellent education and had many good years in the direct marketing/mailing field until it collapsed in 2007/8. Married and divorced twice(walked away from everything with very little, never had kids). Let the house go into foreclosure (live in SoCA)and am paying off the last of my debt. By taking the road well traveled, did I do any better? Or what if I’d taken the other road? Or how about not being the RESPONSIBLE oldest daughter of a Catholic Marine in Ohio for once?
I’m thinking it wouldn’t have mattered – any road will do – as people like me always find the LOVE everywhere we go. That’s ’cause we go around LOVING everybody and everything in sight.
What’s the lesson? Be the LOVE and the rest will take care of itself.
Powerful, Tommy. Your candor is inspiring. Thank you for sharing this with us. The little compromises we make every day have a cumulative effect. So many people wake up one day and wonder, “How did I get here?” They look for the Big Momentous Decision, the Turning Point, and they come up empty. The culprit, and this applies for a life well lived and a life wasted, is the little decision that, made over and over again, defines a life. This holds true economically, spiritually, whatever. The small decisions reveal who our true master is, and whether or not we are slaves.
Though I agree with Ecopax and Susan Marie, I tend to look back now and it all blends together into more Random than Choice. In the moment, we take the path that feels good. Rarely do we have good data to base a decision on when blindsided into choosing life directions. When all of the self-congratulations and self-berating are said and done, just think about how many people actually sat down and weighed the pros and cons of parenthood, then got Betty Jo pregnant anyway because she was willing (and HOT!).
When we truly empower women with a spray or a pill that counteracts all sex hormones, we will begin to understand how humans make actual life choices (nods to FWM), and not before. I present sex hormones as an example, but only because it is obvious to everyone. What is not obvious are the ways we are also controlled by things like thyroid and adrenalin.