Flying Higher & Farther

In the summer of 1972, I read a little book that changed my life. I was 14 and had just finished my freshman year in high school. This book was a global phenomenon. It seemed the whole world was reading it. And so I read it, too.

The book was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a story about a seagull who bucks the system that's confined him to flying altitudes and distances that have made him bored and restless. He wanted to fly higher and farther. He knew that becoming a nonconformist would make him an outcast. And he did it anyway.

"The brotherhood is broken," the gulls intoned together, and with one accord they solemnly closed their ears and turned their backs upon him. Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but he flew way out beyond the Far Cliffs. His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to open their eyes and see.

I was only seven years old when I first realized I was different from the other members of my family. Especially from my two brothers - one older and one my twin. It would take decades of contemplation to make some conclusions about myself, but more about that in another blog. Seven years later, it dawned on me that I was Jonathan Seagull.

Inside me were an outcast, a rebel, a nonconformist, an individualist, a loner, an insurgent, a dissenter. (This was confirmed further at the age of 29 when the Birkman personality assessment ascertained that my stress behavior in corporate cultures was rebellion.) I knew I was different and I knew I wanted to be different.

So, in the fall of that year I made the first breakout move of my life. Having just become a Christian earlier in the summer I felt compelled to broadcast my faith to my classmates. I did that by wearing a large (2"x3") wooden cross attached to a leather necklace. No one else in the school wore a cross on the outside of their clothing. And no one wore one as big as mine. It was scary to be different, but it felt good.

That fall I started wearing overalls to school.They were roomy and comfortable ... and ... no one else wore them. Breakout #2. Within a few weeks more overalls started to show up in school!

Breakout #3 could not be imitated. My grandfather's WW I army coat was in our basement closet. It was heavy green wool with embroidered designs on the sleeves. And it was long, almost to my ankles. This became my go-to winter coat. It was warm, and it was a statement.

My blog is a late season-of-life continuation of the cross, the overalls, and the coat. This is my chance to say things I've always wanted to say, say things that need to be said, and say things no one else wants to say.

I will go higher and farther on all kinds of topics, which are depicted in the graphic above. I will be candid, authentic, and provocative. Reader response will be varied, and I don't much care. This blog is for me. I am this blog.

What he had once hoped for the Flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that he had paid.