The five greatest moments...no exact order. Plenty of others are kicking around but I think this is my five.
Holding my son for the first time. Scared so much I could have wet myself and not realized it. Seeing my wife give birth to him and feeling the intense protectiveness and nurturing seep out in ever increasing daily doses was the most incredible thing I think I'll ever experience. I'm a little boys dad. Wow. I still cant believe it.
Getting past a fairly miserable first 23 years of life, and getting off a set of rails that would have ended with being a nonperson in a nonlife. Homelessness, suicides, abuses, severe illnesses, disconnected family members...its all in there. I was in debt, substance addicted, had a bad crowd of friends, and was likely to either land in jail or be persistently unemployed. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, quit the bad stuff and bad people, got a couple of extra jobs, dug myself out of debt, got my career straightened out, and went from there. I remember the day I decided to change everything, and that was a very defining moment. I spent some time in the last few months digging up all the people I hung out with back then. Dead, jailed, overweight functional alcoholics, stagnant lives, single room apartments, smatterings of children and spouses. But i'm not one of them and I easily could and should have been. At the same time, I cant shake the feeling that I should have stayed and helped them somehow.
Meeting and marrying my wife. I'm a pain in the ass with a bunch of odd foibles and hairballs, she knows it, I know it, and she loves me anyhow. Eight good years. Heres to 80 more.
Gaining financial independence. Sure, showing up for my last day of work in a hawaiian shirt and in flip-flops and making my boss take me to the local sports bar and buy me beers before signing the papers and getting a couple of six figure separation checks was nice. But the day I ran the numbers and realized that pretty soon I wasnt going to be financially dependent on anyone or anything in the future...that was a great moment. For months I thought it was all wrong. A mistake or some sort of dream. The feeling once I realized that it was all real was indescribable.
Lastly, a reinvention. While things were going well for me in my early 30's, I just felt like I was in a rut. I owned a nice house, had a nice car, a good job, a lot of stuff going on. But I wasnt happy. Maybe too many vestigal remnants of my old so-called life. Driving past the old haunts, seeing the old people. I decided to change everything. On a lark I quit my job, sold my stuff, and got in my car with a few boxes of stuff and about $20k I'd saved. Drove cross country to california to hang out with an old ladyfriend who was going to school in the SF area. Through a weird set of circumstances mostly guided by good friends and people that I'd treated well over the years, I got a great job that provided me with the above mentioned financial independence. Found new things that I was good at doing and enjoyed. Met new people. Saw a lot of new places. About halfway through the drive across the country...right about the time i was done talking to myself and eventually arguing with myself...I realized I'd cut all my ties and was a completely different person. An exceptional defining moment.
Well, this got longer and shorter and longer again. Hope it was worth the read.
