Dear Friend,

DATELINE: Cleburne, Texas
ABOARD THE SS ROAD WARRIOR

As I speak The Passionate Warrior and his intrepid crew make final preparations for setting sail across the North American expanse.

Enduring Texas heat in excess of 100 degrees F every day this crew is nevertheless prepared to sail through the heat of he** to reach their ultimate destination, which destination is of course completely unknown at this time.

This will be a short dispatch as the crew will be settling in for a quiet evening’s sleep so as to be fresh and bright for a morning shove off.

The initial course will be a quick trip to our home port to make some last minute arrangements and to also make some minor custom modifications to the SS Road Warrior prior to setting off on the main portion of our expedition for an undetermined period of time.

You can expect regular dispatches from this reporter on occurrences of note as well as on Hugh’s famous long-winded analysis of why some minor matter as a fly buzzing around on board reminds him of world peace or some such nonsense.

Until my next dispatch,

Good Sailing!

Hugh ;-))

Dear Friend,

Today me, my wife and the four kids spent the day futzing around, wasting time while waiting for Monday to roll around.

The RV dealer says that our new motorhome is ready, but we expect to spend Monday morning going over a detailed punch list of systems that we will want to test and get repaired, if necessary, before we shove off.

We have decided that after leaving the dealer we will first head straight home. We want to pickup a few items and my oldest daughter has a doctor’s appointment that we don’t want to miss. There is some last minute provisioning, and I may want to work with a friend to do some modifications and tweaking to the rig before we head out. From home we will likely head north. Perhaps far north.

We spent part of today buying a few laptops for the road at a Best Buy store near Austin, Texas. Did you know that there seem to be Best Buy stores on every corner in Texas? I have also never seen so many nice new shopping centers in this state. It’s an easy place to spend money.

And everything here has been quite nice. People are relaxed and friendly. And we hear surprisingly little accent in the voices of those around us, including people born and raised here.

It seems that the culture across English-speaking North America is becoming quite homogenized. Whether that’s good or bad I’ll leave to you.

One thing that is noticeable here in Texas is the great pride that people have in their state, and in particular in their flag.

It is typical to see across the US huge US flags flying at car dealerships and at the occasional fast food place. It’s a great marketing technique. And the flags are quite attractive.

In Texas you will see as many, if not more, huge Texas flags flying from these flag poles as you do US flags. Often the Texas flags fly alone, without an escort from an equal sized US flag.

I leave this state with the distinct impression that the connections between any other place and Texas have always been and will always be just a bit tenuous.

In San Antonio, we visited the Alamo. I was shocked to discover that not one of my kids had heard of it. When I was a kid, every one knew the story of the Alamo. I think that in the 20th Century, such stories were repeated more in the spirit of patriotism, but today I guess schools and the media no longer consider them important.

We watched an IMAX movie about the battle of the Alamo, and we read the historical presentations and displays.

What I learned is that Texans went from being Europeans, US citizens, or from other areas of Mexico, to being “Texians.” In about ten years after settling the Texas state in Mexico, the Texians fought for an won independence from a Mexican dictator, becoming an independent nation for a few years, and then joining the US as a state. A few decades later, Texas left the union and joined the Confederate States, and was returned to the union only by overwhelming force. In its early history Texas was once a colony of Spain, and later of France. The amusement park, Six Flags Over Texas, derives its name from this multicolored past.

As you probably know, the story of the Alamo is really the story of a determined spirit of independence that cannot be broken. Liberty or Death was their theme, and they chose death over surrender.

In the Alamo I found a small shrine donated by a Japanese gentleman prior to 1920. He saw parallels in the Alamo story to the traditions of the Samauri in Japan, and he wished to commemorate that shared heritage.

Perhaps there are parallels between these two traditions, but I think that those similarities end at the willingness of the participants to die for their principles.

The Samauri code is a code of medieval honor and loyalty. The spirit of the Alamo is a spirit of resistance to submission. The Samauri celebrated personal discipline. The Alamo defenders shunned it. But both groups could work as a team with great efficiency when circumstances required it.

The Samauri fought for personal honor. They defended and enforced the edicts of authority figures. They lived according to a shared idea of what constituted a righteous life, much as a religious colony might today.

The Alamo spirit was based on a shared belief in a right to individual freedom and independence – on the idea that any individual should be free of the control of his or her neighbors, and free to live life as he or she chooses, regardless of what authority figures, or neighbors, might think.

Both groups were willing to die for what they believed in. Not because they were fanatics. Or were suicidal. But because what they believed in, their principles, were so close to who they were, that to surrender them was little less than death anyway.

How many of us would be willing to die rather than give up something that we hold close? How many of us are so in tune with our core principals that we know what would be worth dying for?

I’m not talking about someone being brainwashed into fanaticism. There is plenty of that around these days. I’m talking about really being in touch with what matters in your life.

It’s an interesting thought. If the Alamo were being fought today, who would show up to defend it? What is your Alamo? What would you die for rather than surrender it to a tyrant?

Hope you have a great week.

Hugh

Dear Friend,

I apologize for missing a day or two of posts but I have been very busy.

My first reason for being so busy is that my family and I have been on the road looking for our new RV. We have now purchased one but we have been hanging out in hotel rooms waiting for the dealer to get it ready for the road.

While waiting, we cruised on down to San Antonio, Texas, in our rental minivan to check out a city that my wife and I last visited when we were dating, thirteen years ago. It is still beautiful. This time, we hit all of the spots that we had visited back then, but with our four kids in tow.

My second reason for missing some posts is a minor disaster that occurred with my Twitter account.

Twitter is an online social media Website that I use to network with people and to share ideas. I had over 20,000 people who followed my mini blog posts on Twitter before a few days ago when Twitters computer algorithms apparently decided that my long-standing account might actually have been spaming all of this time and froze my account! I had never even backed up my followers names! Four months of daily and nightly work potentially down the drain. I was devastated.

Since I am on the road with my family this couldn’t have come at a worse time.

If you are a Twitter user, would you please consider sending an email to suspended@twitter.com and telling them that I am a “good guy” and not a spammer, and could they please reactivate my account? It would be huge for me if you did. And could you please drop me a note on Twitter letting me know that you did this? My temporarty Twitter account name is hugh_deburgh. Thank you!!!

My Internet has been spotty on the road, and days have been so busy that I am writing this in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, I’ll keep you updated on our adventures. And I will continue to post on ways that you can take your first steps toward a life of creative adventure with your family.

Talk to you soon,

Hugh

Dear Friend,

One of the biggest concerns that I hear from others about the idea of taking off with their families is a fear that they will kill each other in short order.

I think that every family faces this fear to some degree or another. When put in close quarters and forced to work closely together, people can get on each others nerves. Fast.

If you had some friction in your family when living a conventional lifestyle, you can expect, in the early stages of your transition, that this friction will be magnified twenty fold. You may now be traveling together or perhaps you are involved in some creative activity that requires your family to spend a lot of time together, working as a team? Either way, this is a real issue.

Is there a solution to this problem? Is living a creative lifestyle reserved solely to those families that are completely free of dysfunction and discord (in other words, fictional families)?

There are no easy answers. But if you want to break out of your dull life, and you are determined to take your family along with you, then this is a challenge that you must overcome.

I face the same issues as you. Perhaps the only difference between us is that I am on the road, living my dream, and facing these challenges head on, while you are sitting at home reading about it?

If you just can’t stand spending a lot of “quality” time with your family, perhaps you should just admit this to yourself. The idea might frighten you. You may not like this fact about yourself. But it doesn’t matter. If you’ve given it the old college try but you just know that being extra close to your family will do more damage than good to your relationships, then you need to face facts.

You are who you are. To be fully satisfied, you need to fully accept every aspect of you, including those aspects that you aren’t proud of. Welcome to the real world. None of us can live up to the ideal image we have constructed for ourselves. And so what?

Happiness doesn’t require utopia, just surrender. Surrender to who you really are. If that means accepting that you’re just not that into your family, then that’s what you have to do.

Perhaps this traipsing off to live a new life is your spouse’s idea? Perhaps you are afraid to let them down. Or you are afraid that if you don’t grin and bear it, you’ll lose both your spouse and your family?

Like I said before, this is not an easy process. But understand this – the decision to live your life creatively did not create these conflicts within your relationships, it only shined a light on them. If you prefer to live in denial, then you can certainly do so. But will you live a happy life that way?

I think that it is also important to understand that your fears of a relationship apocalypse are probably unfounded. As I point out in one of my recent posts, the beginning of a new adventure can be quite stressful. If that experience was a good example of the way you might expect to feel all of the time, then only a sadist would pursue a creative family lifestyle.

That early experience is not indicative of that way you will be living every day. You will adjust to your new lifestyle.

For many people, their new creative family lifestyle requires a transition to a slower pace of life. If you have been living a go-go life for many years, even if you are quite tired of that life, you will find the transition a difficult one at first. You may discover yourself cursing others in your new environment whose emotional systems have already adjusted to a new, slower pace of life. They just putt along. They get in your way. Don’t they know that you have a life? Places to go and people to see?

Adjustment can take years. But you just have to hang in there. You may not believe it now, but if this new creative family lifestyle that you have chosen is the right one for you, in a reasonably short time you will never again consider returning to your old life. That is how extreme the impact of making this kind of lifestyle change can have on you.

Your priorities will change. You may rekindle old interests that you had forgotten you had. Old talents may resurface. Or you may discover parts of you that you never knew existed – and that you like very much.

You may find that you actually like spending “quality” time with those closest to you. You had just never given your relationships a chance.

And one day, somebody with “a life,” who is too busy to slow down, will be cursing you for being a slow poke, and getting in their way. At that moment, you will know that you have arrived.

Congratulations!

All the best,

Hugh

Dear Friend,

My family bought an RV motorhome today!

That’s right, one day after nausea city, we inked the deal on a new, class “Super C” RV motorhome.

The kids are going bonkers. Right this moment, they are jumping on the waiting room furniture at the dealership. I guess the dealer staff are putting up with us since we just wrote them a big down payment check.

It’ll probably be this Friday afternoon before the vehicle is ready. Until then, we’ll camp out at the Hampton Inn that we stayed at last night.

The dealer that we purchased from is Fun Time RV in Cleburne, Texas. The staff were nice and professional. Bargaining was smooth. We’ll see if the extras get installed and the details get taken care of by Friday.

In the mean time, the sales rep recommended that we take the kids to Hurricane Harbor Water Park, across the road from Six Flags near Fort Worth. Maybe we’ll check that out. With the 95 degree weather, the water park sounds better than walking in the sun at Six Flags.

On the other hand, there may be a lot of other cool things that we can do around here while we wait.

My eldest, who was begging to go back home to see his friends, has announced that he wants to start a cross country trip right away. Quite a turn-around for him!

We purchased one of the last super-low-price RV motorhomes available on the market.  One month ago the ads were swimming with them.  We knew that we had to buy now or miss our opportunity.

Anyway, my wife has gone off to the Borders bookstore to look for travel books on Texas. I just ordered a couple of delivery pizzas for the rest of us.

I’ll post more as things develop.

All the best,

Hugh

Dear Friend,

I arrived in Dallas yesterday in a state of nausea. I guess that the 3 AM wake-up, herding the excited army onto planes in two cities (a layover in Atlanta), an accidental meeting and catching up with a friend, and then rushing in a strange city (Dallas) to find RV dealers buried in nooks and crannies, all to the tune of “Bobalina Says…” (don’t ask), left my equilibrium a bit mixed up.

It was at this moment that my wife and I began to seriously question what in the he** possessed us to intentionally put ourselves through this nightmare. I’m sure that, if you are a parent, you know that feeling.

After a quick stop at some industrial park to settle my innards and return to a somewhat sane state of consciousness, we began to get our bearings in Dallas.

The next stress source that hit us was a quick search of the online inventory listings of the area dealers that we planned to visit. We had brought with us printouts of these inventories, but by now these were a month old.

As slow as the economy has been, we really didn’t think that a few weeks would make a big difference in dealer inventories. We were in for a shock. The huge inventories of five weeks ago were now gone. GONE. One dealer said that they had never had lower inventories in their history.

The inventory reduction sales had done the trick. While we had been waiting for a more convenient time to get here, a time that better fit our family’s schedule, the rest of the world had made their move. A small stampede of deal seekers had cleared out the lots before we got there.

I guess we failed to learn the old lesson that “the early bird gets the worm.” So now what?

Today we find ourselves trying to find anything that might be available, anywhere. One possibility may be to open up our search area to include the San Antonio and Houston regions. If you look at a map, you’ll see that Dallas/Ft Worth, Houston, and San Antonio make up a triangular megalopolis. Perhaps we will keep our rental minivan a bit longer and head to those cities?

The kids say that they have already found their choice. It’s a class A gas toyhauler, with an upstairs area over the rear garage area that has a window and a TV. They fell in love with that space instantly. My younger son will not stop begging for that one. They are certain that it will sell before we get back to it. And maybe they are right? We’ll see, I guess. But we have to look around.

Where do we go today? We’ll just keep moving around the Dallas/Ft Worth “beltway,” hitting every dealer we can, and see if we have any luck.

We have internet connectivity much of the way. I’ll try to blog when I can.

Thanks for staying in touch. I’ll let you know what we find out here.

All the best,

Hugh

Dear Friend,

Tonight I was supposed to be posting from 38,000 feet. My family and I were scheduled to be in the air, on our way to Dallas, Texas, home to the largest concentration of new and used RV inventories in the United States (at least I think it is).

However, flight schedules being the unpredictable things that they are, our flight was delayed, practically indefinitely, due to weather at it’s original location.

Things actually worked out for the best. The small airport where we were departing from got us the information quickly, and were were able to reschedule an early morning flight, cancel our reservations at the Hyatt Regency DFW (after 6 PM with no questions asked!), and delay the time we are scheduled to pick up our rental car.

The bottom line is that we saved hundreds of dollars on a now unneeded hotel room, will arrive in Dallas at about the same time in the AM that we would have departed the hotel, and I get to sleep in my own (free) bed for one more night. Everything is packed and in the car so there is nothing more to do but relax, and write this post. Ahhhhh. ;-))

The kids are excited, of course. And so is my wife. She just printed out a sheet with a listing of hundreds of RV dealers in a triangular area between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. This could come in handy on the road as we visit these places looking for the perfect rolling home for our little army.

Weather reports for the Dallas area this week are for sunny skies, with temperatures a pleasant 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It will be interesting to see how well we hold up walking from hot RV to hot RV all day through open asphalt parking lots. One dealer advertises that they place bottles of cold water in every RV on their lot for their customers’ benefit. I have a feeling that we will be partaking of their hospitality.

When you live a highly mobile lifestyle, the way in which you leverage technology can make a big difference in the quality of your life.

Lately I have favored small, “netbook” PC computers. Netbooks are rather tiny laptop computers that sell from about $250 to $400 each, and can handle just about all but heavy graphics applications such as 3D gaming. They are light, sleek, compact, and have all the power that I need without all of the bulk and heat given off by my old laptop PC.

The term “netbook” is not a brand, but is rather a description of the typically small size and configuration of these mini-laptops. The big players in the netbook marketplace include Acer, Asus, Dell, Hewlett Packard, and Samsung. The best selling model is the Acer Aspire One, which also happened to be my first netbook ever, purchased at Costco for $299. Other than a terrible touchpad that acted irratically, it was a great machine.

Unfortunately, my Acre Aspire One got damaged last week when I picked it up by the screen and cracked the interior of the LCD. The result was that there is now no discernible image on the computer screen. I have been using it with an external monitor, which works fine at home, but which is of course useless on the road.

Today, and just in time, my new replacement netbook arrived. It’s an Asus Eee PC netbook, Model 1000HE. It’s a bit bigger, with a ten inch screen, and it has a cool blue color. I bought this model because it received the top rating from CNet UK in a survey review of netbooks available today. The 1000HE’s most impressive feature is supposed to be its battery life. My three month old Acer got a little over two hours of battery life before it needed a recharge. This new Asus is supposed to get eight to nine hours of battery life – almost unheard of performance. We’ll see if it’s true soon enough, as I am typing this post on it right now.

The new Asus set me back about $400 US with $4 overnight shipping from Amazon.com. The keyboard feels smooth, and is a bit bigger for my fat fingers to get around than was the Acer.

If you and your family intend to lead a more mobile life, the mobilitty of the technology that you use will be an important factor for you to consider. I just love these new netbooks. They are light and easy to handle. I have even played some networked games on the Acer with my kids, so the power of these new Intel Atom processors is quite impressive. Also, the Atom does not get so hot, meaning it’s more comfortable on your lap over longer periods and it isn’t waisting so much energy through heat loss.

If gaming or better graphics performance is important to you (you can’t miss out on World of Warcraft!) then keep your eye out for new netbooks with the new Ion GPU (graphics processing unit, paired with the Atom CPU. Without getting all techy on you, the Ion should substantially increase performance while perhaps adding $100-$150 to the total price. Some industry insiders doubt that people will pay the extra bucks for this capability. However, if Call of Duty 4 keeps you sane at night, you might want to get one of these new little gems (yes, COD4 will run on a Atom/Ion netbook PC – amazing!).

I have also found that using a 3G wireless modem (in my case from Verizon Wireless), is the best option for staying connected while traveling. They work anywhere cell phones work, and the download speed isn’t bad at all. My wife and I had a fancy cell phone with Internet capability, but we found that we kept hitting the wrong buttons and it was just too complex to do any one thing right. So we traded up for two basic flip phones that are great for phoning and snapping the odd photo, and a single USB stick modem that we share between us. The modem was about $50 I think and the service is $50 per month with 5 Gigabytes of data transfer allowed. We only use the service when needed, but we have never seriously approached the 5 Gig usage limit. An unlimited plan is available from Verizon for a pricey $100 per month. Also, on the 5 Gig plan, if you go over your limit for the month, you pay 5 cents a megabyte I believe for each megabyte of data transfer overage. This 5 cent price is down from 25 cents per minute for overages when we signed up for this plan just a few months ago. Our total cost per month for our current plan is about the same as we were paying for the old super phone and, when paired with new netbooks and simple phones, we are really as well equipped on the road as we are at home.

Tomorrow looks to be a very busy day. I have to catch some sleep now, so I hope to talk with you then.

All the best!

Hugh

Dear Friend,

Tonight I did something that I have never done before. And I feel good about it.

On the other side of the world from me, a revolution is brewing. It’s an internal political matter in a fairly large foreign country, but a country that has little or no direct impact on my family’s life.

Like anyone else, sometimes I find myself drawn to these stories of drama and danger in a far away land. Intense news like this can be intoxicating for many.

So what did I do last night that was so special?

I “retweeted” (repeated to my approximately 20,000 followers on the Twitter social network) messages from several Iranian college students who were hunkered down in their Tehran dorms, receiving gunfire and numerous teargas canisters from Iranian state riot police.

I passed on messages about a seriously injured friend of some students who need medical care fast if he was to survive.

I repeated messages from a young man who cowered in his home with lights off, listening to police outside breaking windows at random, and announcing that anyone who came outside would be killed.

I passed on a home made video, taken on someone’s cell phone, of a large group of riot police intercepting a kid on a bike, and apparently beating him to death with batons.

And I passed on photos of bloody student bodies after an apparent invasion of college dorms by a group of religious “militia.”

These images were not photos on the news. They were not images from war correspondents seen on TV or in a magazine as transmitted from some unfortunate war some years back. I was watching these events happen live, right in front of my eyes.

I saw the images as they were uploaded. I read the posts of these young people, often in broken English, as they feared for their lives in a place that they should have felt absolutely safe (a college dorm). And I reported these events to anyone who wanted to hear about them. And apparently, many did want to know.

After hours online, I took a break (many of the students had fallen asleep) and checked out the coverage of this obviously historic event on the major news outlets.

There was no coverage. I mean, none worth mentioning. And what the attractive talking head behind the desk said did not fit with what I was hearing. Amazingly, their news outlets’ most intense coverage was reserved for the Twitter network itself.

And in that coverage I believe they were correct.

Tonight, I saw the traditional news outlets, traditional sources of what needed to be known by any man or woman, be eclipsed, replaced, and made superficial, by a couple of folks on PCs and Blackberries, often who were typing while shopping for groceries.

The poor kids in Iran continue to experience a tragic situation. I knew that they needed me and all the rest to get their message out tr the world. And they deserved justice. I did my modest best to do what little I could for them.

But the real revolution that happened last night involved myself and all of the other folks who “reported” on this “news.”

In some far corner of the world, every day, there are tragic stories unfolding of bravery, courage, despicable horror, and fascinating excitement. When these stories reach us, we folks far removed from the direct cause or significance of these matters, they are called “news.”

The traditional news outlets simply cannot be everywhere all the time. CNN apparently didn’t even have a reporter in Iran to bring back a story. At least I never saw one. And it didn’t matter. Because we had those kids. And the person with the cell phone camera. And a secret proxy access to the net that they used, possibly via Uruguay, to get those messages and images out to the rest of the world. And we had lil ol’ me and all of the rest of us who got the students’ message of social revolution out to our Twitter followers around the globe.

Presumably, around the proverbial water cooler Monday morning, the recipients of this new kind of news will pass on their newly formed knowledge to their friends and peers. It’s a viral system. And in about six moves, the information will pass on until practically everyone has heard one version or another of this story.

Who needs the media? Good analysis after the fact, and checking out of unsubstantiated facts, will still be needed. But once the news reaches this stage, it’s not really “news” anymore. It’s just history. Its impact on our fast paced world will be negligible, and it precision an academic matter.

Perhaps, the mainstream media will also soon be history as well? Who knows.

I guess we will all witness the development of these matters together. As for me, I found it much more exhilarating, enlightening, and satisfying to participate in the news rather than to simply absorb it passively as it is doled out by traditional media. And perhaps I made an impact for justice as well.

Talk to you soon,

Hugh

Dear Friend,

You have heard many times, from me and from others, that happiness is a choice. And it is. You can be happy as soon as you choose to be.

But is that all there is to it? Sometimes it is. But most of the time the choice that you are making is to take action and change the direction of your life. So choosing is often just the first step in the process of achieving the life that you deserve.

When most folks talk about the process of choosing to pursue happiness in their life, it sounds fairly easy. I mean, once you overcome your resistance to making this choice, your life will be well on it’s way to the kind of life that you really want. You will be in charge of your life, your destiny, right?

Well, yes. But this is where the process can get dicey. Challenges that involve some task that you must solve or something that you need to achieve to get where you really want to be in life (such as the need to graduate from college, for example) can be tough, but such challenges are also pretty straight forward. It’s really you against you. Can you accomplish this thing or not?

However, things can get dicey when the challenge that seems to stand between you and your true life’s path is another person.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone but a sadist would intentionally try to keep anyone else from being happy. And I think that few people do this intentionally. However, making a change in your life often means changing the nature of your relationship with the people around you. It can mean pushing some people away from you who you know are holding you back. These may be people who rely on you, reasonably or not.

I am thinking of people that I have known through the years who stayed in bad marriages rather than leave and pursue their dreams. Some of them would drown their sorrows in drink, and ultimately ruin their lives. I never understood why they were so afraid to just stand up for themselves and make decisions that they knew they had to make in order to be happy.

It seems that there are many people in this world who grow up with the idea that they have less of a right to personal happiness than others do. That they must sacrifice their happiness for the sake of others.

Now I’m not saying that life cannot reasonably require sacrifice. And giving of yourself to others freely can be the greatest route to happiness that there is. What I am saying, however, is that no one who truly loves or respects you would ever ask you or expect you to sacrifice your life’s happiness on their behalf. To expect such a thing from another is the height of selfishness.

And, generally speaking, nobody does ask for this. It just sort of happens. A relationship forms, and somewhere along the way, expectations develop. Eventually, you find yourself in a relationship that takes more than it gives. Or that simply does not fit into the lifestyle that you truly want to live.

Codependent relationships are a classic example of this. There is the parasitic or needy partner and there is the caregiver. The caregiver feels compelled by a misplaced sense of duty to enable the needy partner’s behavior – to give them what they want. The caregiver feels that to put their own desires ahead of those of the needy friend would be selfish. They feel guilt. Yet as I have already pointed out, it is the needy partner who is the selfish one.

Giving is not really giving unless it is done voluntarily. Without coercion. And without guilt. Giving that is motivated by guilt is not an act of love, but is instead an attempt by the giver to satisfy the obligations that the giver imagines she has.

I have talked on this subject before and I return to it now because I want you to understand that it is quite possible that you will have to commit some of the most selfish acts of your life once you decide to follow your own path to happiness. And you need to steel yourself for this challenge.

You will disappoint some. You will anger others. And you may even abandon a few. You may find that your new life choice has alienated you from people whose affections have surrounded you your whole life.

This fact can come as a shock to someone who is flush with feelings of excitement after finally deciding to take charge of their life. They feel good, and full of love for everyone at such a moment. The idea of going from that emotional state to taking actions that seem to hurt others so close to them seems incongruous. It doesn’t feel right. It sounds screwy.

But it is right. Follow your heart. Remember, you have a right to be happy. And nobody’s happiness is more important than yours.

Even if others in your life believe that they have had a more difficult life than you have had up until now, you do not owe them your life, my friend. You owe them honest friendship. And that is all that they can reasonably expect from anyone.

If others feel hurt as a result of your decisions, their hurt comes from within. Not from your actions. If they had expectations of you that turned out to be unreasonable because they interfere with your ability to pursue happiness, then they will have to adjust those expectations, whether they want to or not.

It is important to me that people who are beginning their journey onto their life’s true and natural path not be blindsided by obsticles, especially early in the process. I do not want you to lose confidence so early in your efforts.

I cannot make this process easier for you. And I cannot predict how much, if any, of this kind of trouble you may face on your road to a creative family lifestyle. However, I do want you to be looking out for it, and be ready if it comes.

I wish you blessings and all of the love that you deserve in this world. You deserve happiness. I, for one, am rooting for you!

All the best,

Hugh