I was in bed this morning thinking about my life and all the trials and tribulations that seemed to hold me back from my true potential.  Then I realized that while it may have seemed so, it wasn’t.

I remember some years ago before Marilyn and I were separated thinking I hadn’t suffered enough.  I saw so many miserable lives around me who’d used their misery for good, that I thought I needed some of it.  My life had been one in which it seemed like everything had gone my way.  I was wrong of course, because I’d been bullied in elementary school where I eventually became 8th grade class president.  In my first years at St. Mary’s I kind of went unnoticed until I started on the varsity football team my sophomore year.  But my freshman football year had been miserable.  It was onto the University of Washington on a football scholarship and the failure there which led eventually to me devoting my time to my fraternity and becoming president.

What is was in all these cases was that failure eventually became success.  But after that day of thinking that I hadn’t suffered enough, it seemed like my life took a turn.  Many failures came and few successes followed.  I’d already received my Master’s Degree and had my first book on football published at the time, so it was all a part of the big wins.

So here I am at 70 with what I will call an accomplishment of having written 6 novels and two non fiction books.  Only one has been published, but with Create Space, that will soon change.

What got me going on this was I realized that I just finished writing over 50,000 words during a time in which I traveled to Santa Cruz for Layla’s birthday, returned home for a few days before heading to Seattle for a fraternity founders day, returning home for a few more days, and then heading back to Santa Cruz for Thanksgiving.  And during all that, I managed to discipline myself to write 50,000 word novel about a man who can perform miracles.  (Is that a metaphor for my life and all our lives?)  I also did a number of assessments for students to earn some extra money during the same period.  In addition, I made some key decisions about my finances.

So I guess success is something that only we can measure.  If we look to the world to measure it, most of us would appear to be failures.  I used to listen to motivation tapes for years and the one thing that sticks in my mind is that success is having a worthwhile goal and achieving it.   It’s our goal and no one else’s.  Some may not find it worthwhile.   So in many ways I’m a success because I’ve achieved a number of worthwhile goals.  Stephen pointed that out to me the other day when I was whining about my life.  Of course my greatest accomplishment is being a dad.

So I’m moving on to achieve many other successes, including a movie somewhere along the line.   Never hurts to dream.  But I’m not a failure if I don’t achieve it.  It’s my goal and no one else’s.   I also have set as my goal to become more focused and to publish all my books through create space sometime over the next five years.  One or two will be published in 2013 and hopefully two a year after that until they are all available to a world audience of readers.

I’ve taken a few years off to just do nothing and waste hours of time that could have been spent moving ahead on my goals, but after the loss of my job at Modoc, having heart failure, and losing my job as head football coach at Big Valley, I needed a big rest and for me writing is not work, so I wrote.  As they say, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  Of course this is all easier said that done.  But let me begin.