3. What have been your guided tours
so far?
Who has guided them?
Now I am encouraging you to examine
your life so far. Begin with the
earliest memories you have. To
help spark and refresh some of your memories you may want to take out whatever
family photo albums, movies, video tapes or boxes or trays of slides you have
in your closets or drawers. Maybe
your mother kept scrapbooks from your family trips.
Another source of memories may be
journals: yours or other family member’s.
If you are reading this book today
somewhere where none of these items are available you might do the following:
make lists of family, friends, fellow workers, bosses, teachers, neighbors,
classmates and use your lists to help you recall your memories.
First make single lists of each of
these categories of people from your life. List all relatives from your birth family or your married
family or married families if you have been married more than once. List your friends from different parts
or stages of your life each by specific age or decades or part of your
life. List as many fellow workers
from your various jobs as you can.
List all your bosses. If
you work with clients for your employer or as an independent professional list
clients. Create as many lists as
you can. Keep these lists with you
because they will be helpful in examining your journeys and trips.
Begin by organizing your memories
by the following periods of your life you have experienced so far.
family in general
a. birth
to 5 years old
b. 6
to 12
c. teen
years
d. twenties
e. thirties
f. forties
g. fifties
h. sixties
i. seventies
school years
a. pre-school
b. kindergarten
through the fifth grade
c. middle
school or junior high
d. high
school
e. college
or technical school
f. since
beginning work
friends
work
neighborhood(s)
sports and hobbies
Usually doing the gathering or
collecting or the listing exercise will help refresh old memories to make them
easier to review and analyze. My
hope is that the majority of your memories will be happy ones. When sad or very bad memories come back
accept them as part of your life put them aside as a separate list and focus on
the good and happy memories.
Now list vacations, trips, journeys
you have taken in your life. Start
with family vacations as a child, then as a teenager and as a young adult and
also as an adult if you vacation with family members. Where did you and your new spouse honeymoon? Where did you go as a young couple
before you had children? Where did
you go with your children when they were very young, school age, junior high,
high school.
Follow that list with a list of journeys
or trips you have taken with friends and organize them in chronological order. These could have lasted from a couple
hours to days or weeks. You and your
friends may have gone on bicycle rides together to playgrounds, a public pool,
the beach, a local mall, an amusement park. You may have gone on bus, subway, train or taxi rides. You also may have gone to camp for the
entire summer or several summers together.
Create a list of trips or journeys you
may have taken with other family members outside of your immediate or nuclear
family. The journeys may have been
to their homes on the other side of town, to their farm, to another city, state
or country where they lived.
Add a list of trips and journeys
you have taken with fellow workers or employees.
Take the time to create as many
lists as you can. I believe you
will find this a fun experience. Yes
some of the memories may rekindle sadness or pain. I am sorry for that.
Whenever I do this it does the same. I try to remind myself if I still tear up or feel sad it
demonstrates how much that I truly loved that person or those people or the
anger I may still have. If it
brings up feelings of anger and frustration take an extra moment or two to
think about why it has and then write down 6 to 12 reasons for why it is good
to feel the anger. You will
probably discover some old or new meanings related to the pain and frustration.
Our lives are all filled with many
rich experiences and I am encouraging you to do these exercises to help you
remember and collect them to use to help you create the next journey in your
life.
After gathering and writing your
lists it is time to examine them for some learnings.
Take up a different colored pen and
write notes next to each trip or journey.
Who guided the specific trips or journeys? Was it a relative, friend, fellow worker or you? Or was the
trip or journey done completely spontaneously without a guide at all?
Following noting who the guides
have been review all of your guides to look for a pattern or patterns.
Was your mother or father usually
the guide? Was one of your
brothers or sisters? Was a
particular friend or type of friend?
Were you the guide? Were
the trips or journeys guideless?
What might this knowledge indicate
to you?
Has your life been guided most of
the time or spontaneous or even temporarily aimless? Were there specific reasons or purpose for the trips and journeys? Were the reasons for fun, learning, to
fulfill obligations to someone else, for learning?
When you examine your various trips
and journeys when did they begin to become conceived, planned and implemented
by you? Have there been only
certain types of trips or journeys that you controlled?
Do you feel or think that the
difference in ratio or proportion of trips to journeys indicates anything about
your life so far?
Later in this book this information
will be useful to determine your style of life traveling.
What are key things you have
discovered or learned so far about your life traveling?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
The bus is leaving let’s not miss
it.
It is time to move onto the
next chapter.
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