Love This Road

Mark Posey is my special guest blogger today.  If you’re new to the blog and Mark’s last name strikes you as a coincidence, you’re not wrong.  Mark is the guy that I have been referring to endlessly in my posts for the last six years that I have been blogging. 

Mark has recently hung up his wrestling boots and he’s now an official blogger in his own right.  Love This Road is where he hangs out, and I have to tell you, Saturdays in our household have never been the same since…. both of us writing?  It’s taking some getting used to!

Please make Mark feel welcome (hint:  sass goes over really well.)

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If you had sat me down when I was 15 and asked me to write out how I saw my life going between then and now, at 48, I suspect that I would have gotten almost everything right and I know that I would also have gotten almost everything wrong.

Yeah, I know… that makes no sense.  As I’m sure Tracy could tell you, what I say very often doesn’t.  We usually write this off as “too many hits to the head”.  Occupational hazard.  (Really, I’m just kidding…I really haven’t had too many concussions–that I remember…)  But, bear with me and I’ll see if I can sort it out for you.

For sure, I’d have written down that at 48, I’d be a retired professional wrestler with a wife and 2.4 kids, owned a nice house and drove a nice car.  I’d also have written down that I’d now be searching for something to take wrestling’s place in my life.  After that, I probably would have worked backwards until I got to age 15, filling in all the obvious stuff as I went – retirement match, title wins and losses, all the travel, training, high school graduation and all the rest.

And all those would be basically correct.  There’d be some differences of scale because, let’s face it, when you’re 15 your dreams tend to be closer to pie-in-the-sky than what eventually happens.

Plot all those events out on a timeline and they’d probably have a very linear progression – from A to B and on through to Z – in a very sensible, well thought out, one dimensional path.

Here’s the thing, though: one of the things you learn somewhere between 15 and 48 is that life is not linear.  There are detours, wrong turns, back-and-fills, u-turns, and sudden stops that enrich and broaden the dimensions of your life and could never have been predicted.  So, while the ultimate outcome at 48 was correct, the path I took to get here was almost completely different than I imagined it would have been.

I could never have predicted, for example, that my first wife and I would divorce after only 7 years, that my son would come to live with me after the divorce, that I would meet this crazy Australian woman, that I would love being a stay-at-home dad, or that I would win 17 million dollars in the lottery.  (Oh wait… that’s next year.  Sorry.)  Nor could I have predicted the myriad of smaller experiences that changed me in more subtle ways.

The details.

Life is in the details.

In what happens to us during our daily “busyness” that informs our choices about how and what to strive for – our intentions, our goals, our dreams.

That’s what Love This Road is all about.  Not all of the details in any of our lives are pleasant.  Some of them were downright horrible.  But I wouldn’t change a single one of them.  They made me who I am today.  I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.  Collectively, they made me, me.

Thanks for stopping by.

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