Life Arc

After spending all of my years of youth living with the prospect of being drafted to die in a foreign jungle fighting a futile war started for all of the wrong reasons, announcement of the end of the draft set me back on my heels considerably. I began wondering what the hell I was going to do now after preparing for so long to be killed before I was twenty, or maimed to live out a horrid existence as a disabled veteran of foreign war no one gave a damn about.

It took over a year of nonstop partying and celebration at this turn of events to motivate me to begin adulthood on a new arc into the future I had not even dared to consider before. And as my mind churned over the possibilities, I'd have never imagined the outcome of it all.

After a pair of recon missions investigating enlistment into the Air Force and then the Army, it became all too obvious those two paths would lead to dead ends just not worth pursuing. So I commenced adulthood working as a common laborer, starting out on a wildcat drilling rig. After one summer of that and a year working at an ice & locker plant I finally decided to enroll in college coursework to prepare for a better existence. What I might become was still unknown, but that didn't worry me too much. I was still alive and in one piece, and relatively sound of mind. I was also fortunate to have been born with an unassailably optimistic bent.

So a third of the arc entailed working as a common laborer, living paycheck to paycheck while attending college courses at whatever university I was living closest to at the time. The other two thirds of the arc working as a degreed professional writing software for application across nine distinctly different lines of business didn't resemble any imagined arc of progress occuring to me as I embarked upon the journey, but in retrospect it all makes perfect sense. I survived the shifting, often very dangerous job environments worked in as a common laborer, and managed to finally find purpose in the fields of applied sciences suitable for me.

Most valuable of all results was discovery that learning is the grand reward of pursuits in life.