DESTINY
When I was a little boy, I visited a farm with my family a few times. I’m pretty sure my father was the owner’s AA sponsor though I would not have known it at the time. Our brood, nine kids, were invited to come out and spend the day on occasion. I learned from a client that farm has been sold in the last few years. I have no idea where it would situate today though it was near where I presently live.
I just remember being enchanted by the place. There was an old farmhouse, a shed out the back door big enough to hold farm tractors and equipment, and beyond the farmyard a good-sized barn. Chickens and turkeys and geese wandered about purposefully. I think there was a pond. There were cattle in the field and the barn upstairs was full of hay. They had guinea pigs living under their front stoop.
It was my kind of place and so, I decided I wanted to become a farmer and declared my intentions forthwith.
That didn’t’ pass muster with the adults. They said I’d go broke, that farming was a cruel life, and that nobody does it seriously anymore. I gave up on the idea and eventually we didn’t visit the farm anymore. I would have to find other paths to nature, and I did. There was Sawmill Creek near home but also cubs, scouts, and pioneers, all which allowed me to spend time in the woods and the great outdoors.
My family had moved us from Halifax to Ottawa so dad could work at the National Defence headquarters and so I missed kindergarten and started school in grade one. I’d worked hard with my mother to learn how to read at age five so I could be like my elder siblings. What a cruel trick it was to arrive at school and find that it was for naught as no one spoke English. In fact, it was forbidden.
Nevertheless, I learned French, mostly by osmosis because it was all gibberish to me at first. I spent time in the back vestibules with my head up against the wall for making everyone laugh with my nonsensical imitations.
The first year and a half were not so much fun. I was an Anglo in a French Catholic school during the rise of Quebec nationalism. All my teachers were either nuns or French natives with deep ties to the adjoining French province of Quebec. I felt their discrimination deeply.
Yet one day in grade two, I arrived in the morning not understanding French as usual and as the day progressed, at some point I did. I suddenly realized, “Hey, I get this!” and wondered at how that happened. Thereafter I could understand French and have ever since.
I fought my way up the grade school social hierarchy to where in grade six, I was voted class president. I loved the role, getting to hold meetings to solve classroom problems, standing at the front of the class and thanking other grades when they came by to give a performance or presentation. I also had a kindly teacher by the name of Mrs. Stewart who spoke the odd English. I felt appreciated in that grade.
I decided to become a teacher.
In middle school the following year, a well-intentioned teacher put the kibosh on that quickly. I can still picture her face and demeanour at the front of the class telling me that the job sucked: long hours, marking on weekends, a room full of unruly kids, parents, and school officials to deal with. Besides, I think she said you made 18K per year and so it was a dead end financially.
Convincingly, she talked me right out of it.
After being tossed out of the house at fifteen as my father burned out and broke down, his violence having left an indelible scar on my psyche, I dropped out and drifted into drugs and crime. I’ve been shot, stabbed, hit with baseball bats, and did time for shooting others. I guess you could say I gave as good as I got. I was officially pardoned by the govt about twenty years ago
I’ve been a street sweeper, a carny barker and a door to door salesman; I’ve dug trenches with a jackhammer putting in natgas pipelines and operated a forklift in a warehouse and welded sewer pipe inner cages on a twelve hour overnight shift; I have cleaned govt offices after hours and later worked as a retail men’s clothing store salesman; I hustled one of Canada’s first loyalty cards, and for a time worked as a real estate agent while also operating as a flower wholesaler and owning a florist shop; and I was an addictions residential counsellor, saw clients privately, and also taught the reality of alcohol use to men who had lost their licence to drunk driving; I later built the largest newspaper paid circulation salesforce in Canada with 150 reps and 18 managers in seven cities; and a few years ago, I sold energy to farms and businesses and then worked at a tech startup.
Very few of us go through childhood with a clear idea of what we want to spend our lives doing, or at least, with a definite sense or clear interest that draws us in. Sometimes I will run into someone who tells me, “I’ve always been attracted to this” and so that’s what he did. It happens, but usually they have taken a round-about way there.
We become adults and look around at the many paths we can take to try and make sense of life and our place in it and are often or usually stopped in our tracks with indecision.
Yet, I can tell you for me, looking back, there were signs of my destiny all along. I was born smack dab in the middle of a family of eleven and I think this made me a good manager. I had to negotiate adults and younger siblings. I’ve also worked since I was about ten. That was when I left the house one day and went business to business on nearby Bank Street looking for work. That’s me on my father’s right with the first four of my siblings.
I mowed lawns and shoveled snow and washed cars and planted gardens for my neighbours. I was helped along first by older friend Rod with whom I collected discarded bottles to claim their two-cent bounty, and later by my super-hustler buddy partner Graydon who taught me how to cross Ts when it comes to snow shoveling and grass cutting. I think about that OCD bastard with great fondness every time I shovel snow or cut grass, ensuring I have my banks even and tidy and my lines straight.
I see him and another childhood friend now and again these past few years since I moved back near my hometown. He’s still washing and waxing cars, meticulously.
Now I live on 200 acres of bush and grow a big organic garden in summer to feed myself and my family. There is nothing like walking outside and harvesting vegetables and salad stuffs, tomatoes and kale and spinaches and the like, from your own soil and labour. Nothing. This gives me a powerful buzz.
I also forage plants from the surrounding fields and use folk medicines. My evening tea is often a combination of dried plants I have stored in containers. Each year I expand my knowledge a little bit and my harvests and concoctions.
I walk in the area at least once but often up to four times per day with my wife’s Cocker Spaniel, Remington Cabela. She’s named after a gun and sporting goods store. I accept that.
And I teach everyday worldwide to appreciative men whose lives are positively affected by the hard-earned lessons and depths of learning I have accumulated. I write and teach… and sort of farm.
Perhaps that is the lesson I’m trying to share with you. That you cannot escape your destiny and if you do it will be a painful journey. That you were chosen for life by heavens of infinite wisdom and arrived here fully loaded and ready to go with your potentials and possibilities intact.
And that nothing about how things “should” be or how you “ought” to act or what you “must” do with your life applies in the final analysis. The only thing that counts is that you are true to yourself, to your gifts.
Here’s some advice:
It is every man’s purpose to listen carefully to his yearnings; to identify what comes easily to him, watching with vigilance for things that enthrall and capture his attention; to discover what he is good at and which he finds satisfying; and to then sharpen these talents as he might take a stone to the edge of a blade, taking rough steel and making it supremely useful.
He expands these heavens bestowed talents into strengths and manifests these into the world to make a positive difference, allowing his unique energy, his power and love, to ripple out for the benefit of all.
It may be useful for you to return to your earliest memories and look for the seeds of your destiny there before the after-build installation of a conforming ego by your caregivers obscured your desires.
What did you yearn for?
What came easily?
What captured your attention?
What were you good at?
What satisfied you?
Who would you need to be to live up to your potential?
What would it mean to look to the sky each day with satisfaction knowing you are fulfilling your promise?
How could you be that person?
Accept this challenge, follow your sacred destiny…
Questions? Comments?
Love & Power,
True and Free
cw
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