An Amazing Life

I’ve had an amazing life. It’s easy to forget, especially with my fogbrain, but my life has been exceptional, exciting, stimulating. It feels normal to me because it’s always been consistently so, but looking back… wow.

Yes, it’s easy to forget, but from time to time I stumble across triggers that bring it all back. Today, that trigger was a bunch of old directories I peeked into when moving them to a new hard disk – it turned out they were archives of my old websites.

I’ve been building these things since the mid 90s – my current site is the 5th iteration – but they’ve always been remarkably consistent. I keep writing the same things over and over again and forgetting I did so. The style has been pretty consistent too: photo albums with a few pithy comments, clean design (cleaner than my current WP theme, frankly), and all painstakingly built by hand from HTML and Javascript (remember ‘AJAX’?). My enthusiasm diminished as Facebook became prevalent and redirected my desire to brag (and boy did I brag – as I said, remarkably consistent).

As I read through those old posts, I realized how abnormal my life has been. Most families buy a starter house, live in it a while, then upgrade if they can – we’ve bought or built 5 houses and sold 3. We’ve been to dozens of countries, to almost every continent, on trips exotic and mundane. We’ve owned dozens of cars, exotic and mundane. Two sailboats. Kayaks. Hamsters. We had 9 dogs at one point.

All of this felt normal. It wasn’t, I guess. I’m so happy I did all that stuff, and that I have all this other stuff I want to do. I’m so happy I never listened to that little voice telling me ‘settle down, Bub’. Naw, maybe later.

And even though it felt normal, it was never boring. I was always in awe. I’m in awe every time the wind grabs Azulita and gives her that delicious push, though it’s happened hundreds of times. I was in awe when I finally made Thunderhill’s Turn 7 without lifting my beloved Lotus’ go pedal, and was in awe every day I drove it to work in Silicon Valley traffic. I’m in awe at the kind of work I get to do every day, and in awe of how much pure delight tossing a toy brings to my dogs. And I’m in awe of when I swam with seals, and when I saw phosphorescent dolphin trails on a perfectly still night while sailing out on the open Pacific, and when we landed an antique plane on some glorious glacier in Alaska, and when I huddled with my kids on freezing Haleakala staring at the alpenglow preceding the most glorious sunrise I’d ever seen except for all the other amazing awesome glorious sunrises I see all the time because I’m always in awe.

Anyway, my life is amazing. I’m grateful for all of it.