Friday, December 20, 2013

What I've Learned Along the Way - An Interim Observation

Thanks to all of you who have already commented on "What I've Learned Along the Way," Part One. I hope you will continue to comment and that those of you who haven't will do so. This is a subject in which no one's opinion is set in stone. Even the so called experts disagree vehemently. But in my mind those of us who have lived gay or bisexual lives are more likely to grasp bits and pieces of the truth than are the experts.

Those of us who can take the bits and pieces of truth we possess and apply them thoughtfully and realistically to the homosexual and bisexual communities at large can shed a great deal of light on the overall cultural characteristics of the still evolving homosexual and bisexual communities. And because we are all a part of these evolving communities in one way or the other, each of us has an obligation to share our thoughts and feelings.

Anyone who has read my blog for anytime at all knows I believe in destiny. I believe life has a purpose for all of us, and I believe to the extent we are on track to fulfill our purpose in life and our destiny to be a prime contributor to our overall sense of self-worth and happiness.

I gave up on believing in coincidence long ago. It was not something I chose to do. It became
something I was compelled to do, for if coincidence is real, my life has been an almost never ending string of fortuitous coincidences. That is just not possible. It would be the same as going to Vegas and winning every hand one played for years. It's not possible.

Behind everything we might want to see as coincidence, there has to be a guiding power. Otherwise, my life has defied impossible odds. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some male version of Mother Theresa.  I'm no saint! I've had my share of adversities, wrong turns and doubts. But, along the way, I've had way more than my share of instances of seeming coincidence that simply had to be much more than mere serendipity.

Such a thing has taken place in just the last month. I made up my mind to write this article 6 to 8 weeks ago. My illness and subsequent confinement to an Intensive Care Unit gave me a great deal of time to think about the self-assigned task. I didn't tell anyone about it. I just thought about it. But the most amazing things began to happen. An old friend whom I had not heard from in a long while phoned me he other day. And what did he want to talk about? He wanted to talk about this article. He didn't even know I was writing about it, but he was facing issues in his own life that was leading him to some of the same conclusions I was planning to address in this article. It would have been unnerving had such a thing not long ago become ordinary in my life.

In addition to that call, my young friend here in Houston who had inspired this article over the last three years of our relationship, suddenly wanted to talk about the issue in detail as he was experiencing it in his own life. There were, out of the blue, several other seemingly coincidental incidents which contributed to this article. Every where I turned, I was finding thoughtful pieces of information that were valuable to the task at hand. Such an unrequested outpouring at just the right time cannot be mere coincidence or providence. There has to be a power of some kind behind it, especially when I consider that it happens over and over in my life.

The only down side of all this is that I have much more to consider now than I had planned. That along with my transition to a new therapy for my cancer will delay the planned publication date for the second part of this article for a few more days. During the wait, I hope many of you ( by many, I mean at least 100 of you ) will take the time to read or reread Part One and comment on it. It would make my day. I've never received 100 comments on any post.

Hang in there. Thanks for following my blog. I appreciate you all. Please tell your friends who like thought provoking reading about my blog.

Jack Scott

2 comments:

  1. This was such a good read, thank you so much! I like to believe in destiny and that life is not simply a series of random events.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm with you. I think life is a random series of events only if we allow it to be.
    That does not mean I believe there is no randomness in life. If that were true we would be robots and that would be worse that the random series of events.

    It seems, for me, that I have always had a destiny. Along the road to fulfill that destiny, there have been unexpected events I've had to overcome. Amazing how often those events taught we something I needed to know to help fulfill my destiny.

    Jack Scott

    ReplyDelete

I deeply regret that I must reinstate the verification process for those who want to leave comments on my blog. This is due to the intolerable amount of spam that spammers are attempting to leave on the blog.

At the same time I am changing settings so that those of you who have a Google Blogger ID or other recognized blogger ID will not have to have your comments moderated. My hope is this will encourage more readers to take the time to comment. The fact is I want to read comments with those of you who disagree with me as well as those of you who agree with me. All I ask is that you keep your comments clean and non-threatening.

The only reason I take the time to write this blog is to spur your thoughts and comments. Please do not let the spammers cause you not to comment. I know entering the verification words and numbers is a pain in the ass, but I hope you will not let the spammers cause you not to comment.

I still very much look forward to hearing from you.

Jack Scott

Anyone can comment on what I write in this blog. Regretfully, the recent amount of spam in my email account as required that I reinstate the word verification process for comments which I personally hate.

But at the same time I have loosened the comment moderation process so that those of you who have a Google Blogger ID or other recognized blogger ID will no longer need to wait for your comment to be moderated. I'm hoping this will tempt you to take the trouble to comment.

The truth is I want respectful comments both from those who agree with me and those who do not. All I as is that you keep comments to the point, clean and non-threatenting.

I look forward to hearing from each of you.

Jack Scott