A Decision That Rules Out Choice

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Walking is an activity I don't have any problem getting into. The walking I do is not very strenuous. I aim for distance and repetition more than cardiopulmonary exercise. It hasn't been that long ago that I read something about how humans hunted that impressed me. The article stated that the humans biggest advantage in hunting other animals is that they did it in packs, and they depended on outlasting their prey more than physically overpowering them.

Hunting that way explains why people who go on safaris in Africa hire "beaters" who round up the animals and drive them toward the hunter who doesn't really hunt at all. The beaters do the hunting. The safari person is just there to make the kill. They pay the beaters. Everybody is happy. No blame.

I've never been much of a hunter. My father was and provided me with every opportunity I might have needed to get fired up about it. I just don't get a kick out of killing things. I've killed and eaten enough animals growing up to know. As soon as I joined the Navy and got out on my own I never hunted again.

I'm pretty much the same way about fishing. I know enough about fishing to be able to do it to survive. I've worked on charter boats and shrimp boats as hired help. I didn't care much for it. I did it, like I did truck driving in my early sixties, because I had the idea it might be something I could like doing to make some money. It was all dirty, greasy work, and the absentee bosses were all assholes.

It might have helped if I had understood about investing money. I don't understand it even now that I'm vaguely aware that it's going on. It's only since I've been reading on the technical news sites that I became aware of people who made piles of money creating dot.com companies, selling them to larger companies like MicroSoft, and spending the rest of their lives taking care of their millions by investing in up and coming dot.com companies as a way of making money with money.

I can't think of anything I'd rather do less of than developing a grub stake to bilk people out of their hard-earned money, although it's quite obvious that somebody is gonna. That's what the great unwashed are for. They're what they are to be taken advantage of by people they grow to admire.

I've spent my entire life learning how to take advantage of the people who have been taught from the cradle to the grave that it's better to give than receive. I do understand the dynamics of how that happens probably as well as anybody, and better than most. I just don't do it. I don't follow through. When and if I get enough money to survive for a while I stop trying to get more.

There is a specific stopping place when enough is enow. All I need is enough money to go off and be by myself for a good long time, and I could care less what people think I'm leaving their employ for. I just stop showing up because I'm unavailable to even defend my decision. There has always been a real good chance that if I wanna come back and take up where I left off, it can happen without much inconvenience to all parties concerned.

It took me an incredible amount of time to understand about investing money. It's still not interesting to me. I have one long-term friend who is really good at it. He has talked to me about it from his first success to his latest victory. Another guy I've known even longer spends incredible amounts of money on various "projects" and never makes any money at all.

As much as I like to talk to my friends and acquaintances, and as much as they feel like they have to fight to get a word in edge-wise, I usually end up listening to them more than they listen to me. Much of what I talk about is a set-up to get them to talk about what matters to them. Most of the people I spend time around are not as gifted for expressing their thoughts and feelings as I am is, but they wanna be.

I know how to help other people speak their minds. I'm self-taught in a lotta ways, but I've paid good money to go to schools and seminars to refine my basic talent. I know that most people can get everywhere they wanna go with themselves if they just talk about it enough.

If I can get somebody to defend something they do it's like getting my foot in the door. There is a reason for me pissing people off and forcing them to feel like there is something about what they truly believe in that's worth fighting about.

People in general might be surprised to understand that many people don't realize they are emotionally invested in what they truly believe. They don't realize that having something worth dying for is having something worth living for. It doesn't really matter what that is.

I wrote a post today in which I told this guy that he had wasted his entire life by doing something his people were mighty proud of him for. This might seem odd that I'd cop this attitude at first glance. I had my reason for telling him that, again, because I've told him something similar ere now. Here's why:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

The above is one of the 114 sayings of the Gospel of Thomas. One of the manuscripts written in Egyptian Coptic and found in some ceramic jars out in the desert in 1945. The post I wrote to the guy to tell him he had wasted his life was a response to a post he'd written me in an e-mail discussion group on the topic of the Gospel of Thomas.

He fancies himself a competent translator of the ancient languages involved in these writings, and when we were discussing this same saying, he changed the word "hate" to something softer and more gentle. Something more in line with the comments in the King James Version of the Bible that states that children should love and respect their parents. That's why he has wasted his life.

He wasted his life because he became what his parents wanted for him instead of discovering and implementing his own way of living his life as an individuated, awakened person. A lot of people do that. Many more than don't. There is not a single, solitary thing I wanna do about it. It's a decision people have to make for themselves, and if they don't, they'll never understand why they should have. No blame.
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