Hello I'm Rich Brown and this is my personal website and blog. I'm just your simple, average, down to earth, professional, out gay man and aspiring circuit boy, living in Phoenix, Arizona with a few things to say while trying to find my place among all the scary, conservative, religious nuts in this sick and twisted world.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Moving Through Life With a Dream
Life is short. A simple truth which at some point in time everyone realizes. Often as we move through life we stop for a minute, turn around and check to see if we've taken the correct path. We ask ourselves if we've made the right decisions up to this point in our life and try to find some reassurance that we're still headed in the correct direction.
I don't know if everyone goes through this or not, but I while I personally feel that I've chosen the right path and have made fairly good decisions in life, I can't see a clear path ahead. I believe that problem for me actually lies in the unknown future and the amount of endless paths which lie ahead to get there. If we don't know where we're going, how do we know how to get there?
Ok yes, I'm well aware that I have a tendency to over think things like this. I always have, I get it from my Mother, the worry wart. Fortunately I'm not as bad as her, I'm somewhere in the middle.
The reason I bring this up is because while I'm very happy with my life right now, given the opportunity to change my future path, I wonder if it's actually possible to be even happier? When I was in New York having dinner with my friends I was told by a cross dressing, palm reading, astrologist, who we fondly later referred too as Ms. Cleo, that things are actually going so well in my life that I'm actually looking for reasons not to be happy. Could she be right? My friend Bernard once told me back in 2000 that my biggest challenge in life will be to find what it is that truly makes me happy. I always think back to that conversation with him knowing he's always been right. It really has been my biggest challenge to find that balance of happiness in my life. I only feel like it's something I've really been able to achieve in the last year or so.
I know that everyone has their hopes and their dreams in life. Some people are lucky to be actually living them, others are still trying to achieve them, and then their are people like me who are still trying to figure them out. Even when I was in University I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I changed majors several times, I flipped from Engineering, to Computer Science to Economics to Political Science to Undecided. I finally sat down with an advisor who asked me what really got me excited in life. I said to party (imagine the foreshadowing I didn't realize was actually going on for me back then ... ) He laughed. I said I was serious. I truly loved to have parties, I loved to be around people, and I simply loved to be social. He immediately asked me if I ever considered a career in the Hospitality Industry. I said no, even though I was working as a waiter & bartender to get through school, I really had never thought about it. I left our meeting, talked about it with my parents and shortly thereafter I changed my major to Hotel & Restaurant Management. It was one of the best decisions I had ever made in my life. I loved my classes, I started doing very well in school and most importantly I graduated two years later.
I quickly moved from bartender to bar manager to dining room manager. I thought my path was set but somewhere about a year after I left school I received a call from a former professor. He was calling to let me know he recommended me to a computer company working in the hospitality industry. I was contacted for an interview and was quickly hired by them since I was apparently the perfect candidate having a background in both computer programming and hospitality. Just when I thought my career in hospitality was set I was whisked off into the world of technology, computers and programming where I still remain to this day. I sometimes wonder how my life would be different had I decided to stay in hospitality instead.
The funny thing about all this ... while I always thought I wanted to have a career in technology, I don't tell many people this, but I honestly don't enjoy it all that much. Don't get me wrong, it's fun at times, somewhat personally rewarding, and certainly pays very well but the bottom line is that it's extremely boring to me. The work is most often mundane, routine, and basically too interpersonal. I deeply miss the social interaction with people I had while briefly in the hospitality industry. I imagine this is why I continue to travel and go to parties like there's no tomorrow. What can I say, I love people.
I do often daydream about how my life might be different if I made some changes in life such as my career or my hobbies. I don't think about this with any regret in the choices I've already made, rather I think about it in regards to what the future holds for me. Yes, as I said before life is short, but we always have the ability to make a change and take another path. In life there is no correct path, every path leads to an infinite number of unknown outcomes, all of which we have to discover on for ourselves. I never think it's too late to try out something new.
I know I'm not even ready to make a change as drastic as a career change, I mean what would I do? I'm certainly not going back to hospitality after all these years in technology. I'm also not going to start something completely new either because after all, I'm quite successful and I'm not ready to start all over at the bottom at this point in my life.
What I have actually been toying with is the idea of trying out a few interests a little more seriously. One of these interests is Photography. I've long thought that I would like to explore my hand at some more serious photography rather then the point & click photos I've limited myself to over the past few years. Whenever someone has asked me the question "If you could do anything you wanted in life, choose any career, regardless of money, what would you do?" I've often thought to myself that I'd love to be a professional photographer and travel around the world taking photos. It combines my love of travel with my love of new places, people and things. I've thought if I could be successful, I'd have fun doing what I truly enjoyed and have a career which I can only imagine would be intensely rewarding on so many different levels.
A few photographs I took while in Paris with Justin in 2005.
Oh well, I know it's quite an ambitious aspiration to have and it's truly up to me to take the steps necessary to try it out, but it's something I've actually been giving thought too lately. I guess you really never know where life is going to lead you from one day to the next, so why not explore as many options as possible? What's the worst that could happen, I might actually realize my dream and find myself even happier then I am now. That would be such a bad thing would it? Cheers!
I think Miss Cleo was right. But one thing I have noticed is that whenever my life starts to move in a better direction, I look a littl emore critically at all the other facets of it and try to improve whatever I can. I think success is addictive that way, obviously, not a bad thing.
|______________________________________________________________________ posted by Jerry Timms @ Friday, September 14, 2007 4:36:00 PM
I love the Paris shots! I can totally see you travelling and doing something like photography. Why not take it up as a "serious" hobby Rich, and see where that takes you?
I was bitten by the photography bug last year and I find it hard to go anywhere without taking my camera now.
|______________________________________________________________________ posted by Jude @ Sunday, September 16, 2007 8:46:00 AM
This post has been removed by the author.
|______________________________________________________________________ posted by Jerry Timms @ Saturday, September 22, 2007 8:02:00 PM
Thanks for posting the fattest possible picture of me by the way. Blog more and move that shit down! :P
|______________________________________________________________________ posted by Jerry Timms @ Saturday, September 22, 2007 8:06:00 PM
