Simplify, Simplify

Only one more week until the adventure begins! Time in the office seems to drag by with the pace of a snail riding piggyback on a tortoise. The last few weeks have have been full of tying up the loose ends here at the office and putting things in order personally to make this happen. Condensing your life down to fit inside the back of a dinged up and faded 2002 Blazer has been an enlightening experience to say the least. Selling the furniture, giving the TV to a friend (which by the way was much harder than I anticipated, however, suprisingly easy to adapt to), going through years of accumulated 'stuff' to find the essentials, etc. Now I'm down to my laptop, a U.S. Army footlocker that belonged to my grandfather filled with a few blankets, a few of the great books, pads of paper for writing, a few changes of clothes, and my multi-tool. The laptop I guess is my most prized possession, but I have a feeling that once the real adventure begins the mummy-bag rated down to 0-degrees that I ordered will take its place at the top of the polls! (thanks Sis!) I'm looking forward to starting the journey instead of just thinking about it and planning it... All the planning and dreaming in the world won't replace putting the truck in gear and hitting the road!

After I escape from Florida, where I've been held 'prisoner' for the last three years, I'll head north to 'get back to the south' where I'll stop in Beaufort, SC to see some old friends that I left when I came down here, then to Uncle Bill's in Georgia for some catch-up time. Next will be a stop in Little Rock to see my sister and Jada, and then it's off to ??? Maybe Iowa to see my friends Ann and Bishop, then to Wisconsin to take in a Packers game with my friend Schmidty. I guess that's the plan...to have no real plan at all for awhile. Will I open a little general store in the Wyoming mountains and sell camping gear, peppermint sticks, mountain honey, and socks? Or deal poker in Vegas if I need the money? Who the heck knows, but its all really just secondary to living life and learing what its all supposed to be about.

A friend of mind once said that his idea of 'why we are here' is to "give a gift to the world and learn a lesson from it." I think that's a pretty good plan. What lesson do I need to learn? What gift do I have to give? And where will it all happen? George Elliott said it this way, "It's never to late to be what you might have been." Right on George. And the great twenty-first century philospher Shania Twain said it well too... "If you're not in for love, I'm outta here!" Next post I'll discuss why this adventure is happening now; what is driving me to take this on and what I really hope to achieve. Until then, I've got one more 'weekend' to enjoy!