It's odd how things turn out. It wasn't that long ago that my wife Sarah, her two girls and I moved from the bustling, small city, Nanaimo (pop. approx. 100,000) on Vancouver Island to Fosterville, New Brunswick (pop. approx. 50 in the winter). I'm not sure if we were worn out from the pressures of city-life, especially the costs of just daily living but we found moving to the edge of a semi-wilderness area quite refreshing, as if we had stepped out of a heavy coat of armour. At first, we may have been suffering from "culture-shock" but as we embraced this quieter and more subdued lifestyle, we were happy to have done so. Moving from the city to the country, especially when I had been raised and eventually earned a very successful living as a "big-city-boy", one would think that I'd have remained in the city. However, having a taste of country living and spending 10 years on a racetrack working with thoroughbreds during my younger years, my heart always leaned towards a more quiet lifestyle.
I can remember, shortly after getting married in Lethbridge and moving to Calgary, walking downtown surrounded by bustling traffic and towering buildings, actually looking up and at them and yelling, "It's so good to be home!" And, for me at that time in my life, it was a good place to be since I was full of "big-city" ambitions, obsessed like so many others of becoming a millionaire. It took a lot of hard smacks, knock-down-crawl-around events to finally realize the dreams I had chosen, although attainable, really hadn't been worth the effort. There's a price to pay for everything - like the old hippy adage, "Ass, gas or grass; nobody rides for free!" As the years went by, on pieces of paper, cold as a corpse's shroud, I became a millionaire by the age of 41, but being out of control from reaching the heady-heights, suffering from a plaguing ego-vertigo, I toppled like a house built from a deck of cards. Believe it or not, basically looking at my life at that point after losing everything, was the best thing that could have happened.
Like many disillusioned young men, after their dreams have been broken into countless shards and never being able to put all the pieces back together again, especially when their soul is battered and bruised, I went in search for the "meaning of life". I'm 72 now, over 30 years of searching and I have yet to discover the full meaning. However, that being said, I did discover many things that were not the "meaning of life" - gobs of money and richly possessions being two of them. And as odd as it may seem, I'm not so sure if the hard lessons I received and my journey of searching for the meaning of my existence has been achieved - I may not have much money now but I live in a huge house with two other people, have a separate studio, garage, barn and hen house on 50 acres of land, a truck and a car are in the driveway, a wheeler parked out back as well as a dinghy from my sailing life and the possessions keep accumulating. The hole in the ground is beckoning but there's no room of any of those things that I've accumulated, it's just a large enough space to hold this old, worn out body, a place for it to rot and eventually become part of the earth. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust - perhaps that's enough and perhaps the true "meaning of life".
Sarah and I went to Fredericton a few days back. It's about the same size of Nanaimo, maybe a little larger. Since she is going to visit her mom and dad in Lethbridge and her daughter Rachel in Vancouver for a couple of weeks, we went shopping for some clothes for the occasion. After returning to the car and heading down the highway, we both looked at each other and mentioned how weird we had felt walking up and down the aisles in the different stores looking at all the clothing for sale - it was as if we had stepped into another world and it didn't feel genuine or real - we were glad to be going home to where we could count the cars going by in a day on two hands. I realize this lifestyle isn't for everyone, actually hardly anyone, otherwise cities wouldn't be overflowing with millions of people but for me, I like the feel of gentle snowflakes on my face when I look up at the black sky overhead and see the countless shining stars, the feel of a biting, bitter wind as it turns my nose blue with the cold and then the warmth of a wood fire as I throw another log on - a house filled with the scent of baking and the feel of my wife sitting beside me - comfort and love - perhaps other true "meanings of life" the genuine and real "meaning of life" - cheers, eh!
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