My “meat and potatoes” childhood
I celebrated my 50 birthday this year and as I look back on my life it has been quite a journey.
I was born in a meat and potatoes family in a small town in Central Alberta, Canada. My childhood was spent in a nurturing and caring environment with my sister and parents. My father was a farmer who worked hard to provide for his family.
We took our yearly week long vacations in early July without fail because we had to take advantage of the window of time between seeding the crops and beginning to harvest them. We went to church every Sunday and attended the weekly pot luck suppers at the local community hall.
Our entire family was blessed with good health. I remember, on the exceptional occasion, where a headache or other pain caused us to blow the dust off the Asprin bottle stored in the shelf in the top cupboard to remedy the situation.
What was real was what we could see, touch, and feel. Not that we weren’t aware of the “softer” side of life but it just wasn’t relevant for us.
Embracing my “working” world
University was not in the plans for our family. That was for other people but not us, so I followed in the inherited career path of finding myself a “good paying” job in the oil and gas sector, and settled in for the next 25 years.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that it’s just that I realize now that, like so many others, I was fitting in my living around my working.
Then two seemingly unrelated events presented themselves to me that changed everything.
First, a lower back injury in 2004 sidelined me fast. I took this especially hard because I had never experienced the physical limitations of injury or disease that so many others have lived. Over the following months I did heal and it was during this period I discovered a whole new aspect of my world that, while at first, seemed almost ridiculous shortly became an integral part of my life.
Techniques like meditation, creative visualization, positive imaging that were once relegated to the “weird” and “strange” became valuable healing and evolutionary lifestyle tools.
Living a life instead of working for one
The economic recession that occurred in 2008 presented the second, life changing, opportunity for me.
I took early retirement, downsized from the many physical adornments of cars, and televisions, and sprawling houses, and began to live a life based on purpose and vision rather than “things”.
I started sharing my story and the valuable lessons and tools I learned with local community groups, schools, and support organizations.
I began developing a series of CD lectures and inspirations stories as well as DVD learning programs that I offer via mail order.
The I Changed My World Today blog is my invitation to you to join me on my journey of exploring and experiencing life to it’s fullest.
