A friend of mine once gave me a life lesson: "I would rather have a story than a dollar." That expression struck me like a speeding autorickshaw... it was clear to me that I would never make the post-modern, neo-liberal model of success and have enough gelt to be comfortable. So I packed up with a goal of achieving a new paradigm of subsistence adventure. Money is my Achilles heel, challenge is my passion. So the challenge is to figure out a way to live more with less. This is the start...
I have accepted the post of Chef de Base/logistician in the DRC with Action Contre La Faim (http://www.actioncontrelafaim.ca/).
I left the field of forestry after 16 years of employment collected across Canada. More by luck than good management, I left my comfortable posting with the BC Ministry of Forests in the downsizing of 2002. One door closes and another opens. It would have been easy to be consumed by the shake-up of losing my job, but Denise and I decided to maintain our plan to take a yearlong sabbatical to Southeast Asia. Sarah was ready to fledge and was off to parts far far away. Moments following Sarah’s last exam, we hopped into the car and were off. During this sabbatical I wrestled with how to select my future. Options are limitless. Selecting one over another was challenging. Each option was bursting with potential and so it became burdensome. Who can claim such fortune? In May 2003 I settled on working toward a new career – one that would allow me to continue to travel to wonderful and foreign places with minimal outlay, hoping that I may also be of some use to others. So August of 2003 saw my enrolment into Humber College’s International Project Management program. Now I start my new paradigm in the field of International Development and Relief. This blog will be my story...
Oh The Places You'll Go! --- Dr Seuss
The Call of the Wild --- Jack London
The Matrix (vol 1)
Lost in Translation
Better than Sex
Before Sunset
"....have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked room or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Rainer Maria Rilke (from his Letters to a Young Poet)...
The very basic of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounter with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun...don't hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it.Just get out and do it. You will be very,very glad you did.
Alex McCandless quoted in "Into the Wild" (Jon Krakauer)
We are travelers, all and separately. We are thrown by fate into adjacent seats on a flight to the coast. In our solitude we may enhance the journey of the Other, who may likewise enhance ours. We embarked separately, we disembark separately, and we head for our appointed ends separately. We profit greatly from each other without using each other.
And then some hooey about 'if we hold on to them they become diversions from our individual task'. Aloneness stinks.
This is a personal web site so the comments herein shall be understood to reflect only those views held by the author.
Should you wish to donate to the fund ensuring long-standing subsistance adventuring, feel free to email me with your pledge.
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