A Lost Sense of Adventure

My previous life was filled with adventure. I attempt to recapture that sense of adventure.

Seen my share of
Broken halos
Folded wings that used to fly
They've all gone
Wherever they go
Broken halos that used to shine
Broken halos that used to shine

Chris Stapleton, Broken Halos

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I was at a Fourth of July BBQ yesterday, and heard Chris Stapleton’s “Broken Halos”. The song reminded me of when I was in Bullhead City and I played “Tennessee Whiskey” so many times on the jukebox at a certain restaurant that a waitress would go to the back of the box and skip the song whenever I played it. The past few days reconnecting with old traditions and visiting places where I used to live my life that have now become like a museum piece separated with glass has added another layer of nostalgia and appreciation for how my life used to be.

My entire childhood and career was one big adventure filled with heart break, road trips, and an underlying sense that my life is headed somewhere and that place is important. Lately, among other things, I've lost any sense of adventure in my life.

A Life of Adventure

In elementary school my step dad was a real cowboy with a mid 90’s red Camaro, and on breaks from school we would go with my mom to Dulce, New Mexico. I would spend my days fishing and exploring the mountains, every year we helped my uncle in the branding his cattle and I can still remember the cloud of smoke that smelled of burnt hair from the branding iron pressing against each calf.

Almost every night we would visit the historic hot baths in Pagosa Springs in Colorado and dip in 104-degree natural hot springs and drive back in the dark on a dirt road cut into the forest. These trips were such a natural part of my childhood I thought it was just the way life is rather than a rarified time that I was fortunate to experience.

When I got older, I loved taking road trips, a consequence from all of the road trips my mom took me on from Albuquerque to Laughlin, Nevada or to Palm Springs, California. I learned to love the open road and dedicated hours and hours to absorbing the natural landscape of the American Southwest, all the small towns on major highway systems, the small clusters of buildings that people built to live in over years and years.

In college, every spring break and winter break I would leave Socorro to go to Palm Springs, leaving an icy, cold, brown landscape and arriving to a lush paradise in the middle of the winter. One spring break my friends invited me to take a road trip, so we left Santa Fe, New Mexico drove through San Francisco, then up the coast of Washington and Oregon driving on cliffs overlooking the ocean in the Pacific Northwest and stopping in small fishing towns.

Even after College the adventure continued. When I graduated with my Bachelor’s, I moved to Denver, Colorado and worked a retail store called Gold & Silver Buyers. My job was to purchase gold and silver over the counter, so I got to see a wide variety of jewelry, coins, diamond rings, even an antique Cartier necklace from the 1950’s with thick bars of gold splayed like rays of sunshine.

The adventure peaked after I graduated with my Master’s degree and was walking the path of my life’s purpose working at GVC where truly every day was an adventure. In the morning starting at 5:00 AM I would venture into the deep pits of a working mine, walk around working equipment 30 feet tall, work with engineers and equipment operators, and solve engineering problems while driving trucks and off road vehicles, and I was getting paid to live this life of adventure. After work I would visit the casinos of Laughlin and have steak and lobster for dinner.

Seeking Adventure

I’m not exactly sure what to do with my life going forward so I write and think and hope. Writing this blog and my book is what gives me meaning and purpose in life right now. It’s been quite the transition from gaining purpose and meaning from working as an engineer with my life based on numbers to being a creative individual and it’s still something that I struggle with every day.

I spoke with someone yesterday about drones, and it reminded me about an invention that I had thought up to make my life easier as a surveyor in the mining industry right before the brick wall fell over. When I was in college I came up with so many new inventions and new ways of doing things with a computer program. One major part of this whole process has been like a salvage operation, trying to salvage parts of my life that can still have value in a post-apocalyptic world.