33 And Living Life: No Shame

    

    Alexander The Great created one of the largest empires in recorded history and he did it all before his untimely death at the age of 32. Jesus saved the entire world with his death at the age of 33. Me... I'm just living life on my terms, in my own way & having as much fun in this life as I can as I make my exit out of here. 

     Now, let me preface by saying, if by the age of 33 you haven't realized that you can't know everything and that you're going to die someday, then I honestly don't know what else to tell you. It's true. This is ground zero for life. If you want to be free of needless stress, then just accept  these truths. I can't count how many nights of sleeplessness I've had, tossing and turning, lost in my thoughts, tortured by my ideas and opinions about things that in the end, quite frankly, don't even matter. I was trying to live my life the way I was told to by my parents, school, television; basically our whole conditioned society and it's expectations. I was trying to abide by them, for the most part. School, job, kids and family. This is the formula. 

     It's safe to say that this formula did not work for me. Maybe I did it wrong or something, I don't know. All I can say for certain is that no matter how hard I tried I ruined one or all of those expectations with some form or another of self-sabatoge. It wasn't until my last downward spiral of chaos and self-sabatoge that I decided I was taking advantage of the opportunity and was going to start chasing my dreams. 

     Let's back up just a little bit here...

 I was seeing a psychologist as a stipulation for being able to continue living at my ex-girlfriend's mom's house, in the garage, for $400 a month in San Jose, California. Not ideal, but unless you've lived in Silicon Valley you don't understand. Anyways, towards the end of our visits, and of my stay in San Jose it turns out, he and I started speaking about doing "Shadow" work. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of the unconscious shadow I point you to Carl G. Jung and his essays on it. For now I will sum it up. It's the idea of everyone having aspects of their personality they consider dark or unacceptable. It's the parts of one's psyche we don't want to accept as part of ourselves. Example might be a selfish person who hates when he or she sees selfishness in others. They project their own dislike for selfishness onto others rather than accepting their own selfish nature. 

     Now, it goes way deeper than selfishness and that's why my counselor had reservations about my undertaking this task. His warnings were heard but not heeded. I still did it. I spent the next two months diving head first into my "Shadow" and embracing my downward spiral. Perhaps another time I will go into details but for now it should suffice to say that it culminated into a moment of such fright and terror that I left my phone on the stove top with the battery out and ran into my backyard, jumped the backyard fence into my neighbor's backyard and busted through their fence into an open area to escape what I believed to be imminent death... Yeah. It was like that.

     Long story short, I went on the lam and hid out for 3 months sitting in contemplation over the direction my life had taken. At some point I realized that I had been having synchronous events occurring in my life ever since I traveled to Salem Oregon to watch the total Solar Eclipse (Again, a story for another time) and somehow I had now found myself looking at a bright new future.. Not one that followed a societal script or the expectations of my family and friends. Neither did it involve me doing anything great with my life, as in rule an empire or end world hunger. My Shadow work took me to my deepest core truth about myself, namely that I was wasting my life doing nothing. I almost died and haven't come close to being a detrimental part of my community and I accept that as no fault but my own, but now I had to ask myself, "what are you going to do with the rest of your life?"

     Well here I am, living the rest of my life, currently in Glacier National Park, enjoying the beauty the world has to offer. Why?Because what else am I doing? After this I plan on traveling the world and living free from the stresses of living up to anyone's expectations. Is this selfish? I don't know and honestly, for once I don't care. It feels great and I'm not going to be ashamed of being 33 and choosing to be a wanderer for awhile. So what? I have no house, wife, kids or a career and I'm probably not going to rule an empire or save humanity. I have however, achieved some level of liberation from the constraints of my conditioning, and in today's world I'm not ashamed to say, that ain't bad.