“I am unable to motivate myself to do things I am not motivated to do.  And my motivation, I admit, comes from things that are illogical.  Er… my motivation is derived from ethereal things. I just wake up one day or more precisely something happens or a series of things happen that make me feel I am supposed to do something and when that happens I respond. I always respond even though I don’t understand it.”

“Uh huh,” the soldier said.

“Yes, throughout my life there have been spectacular happenings, periodically.  They are just wild things and you don’t necessarily know what is happening at the moment. Actually you have no idea. For example when I won that contest. Remember that contest?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so I live in the middle of the desert and one day I go to the mailbox and get a flier in my hand with a contest in it. And right then, I know I can win the contest… 2nd prize. I know I can win 2nd prize in this contest, I just absolutely know it when I am holding the thing in my hand.  So that makes me think I should win the contest, see?  I think it is like God talkin’.  Why do I have this thing in my hand and know I can win 2nd prize?”

“I see.”

“Right.  I knew I could win even before I knew how I was going to win and I didn’t even want the prize.  The prize is for my husband,  in fact I have to make sure he wanted this prize before I entered the contest because I just knew I would win and… I wanted him to cover my ass.  You know. I told him, I do not want this prize but I can win it so do you want it?  And he did want it, badly. He coveted the prize so I told him, okay. I will win and then you deal with it.  So then I did what I had to do to win, I won and various other things happened. All kinds of things happened but I did find myself in Boston, where I wound up eating pizza in a basement. I’d never been in a basement before, I thought it was remarkable.”

He laughed.

“Next thing I know, I went to dinner where  a complete stranger made a comment that led me to come home and leave my job…. a job I loved for a number of years, 7 or 8 years or so but now I am going to take another path.  You see what I am saying. I didn’t know when I walked to the mailbox that day, it was going to lead to this. I didn’t know when I contacted you, I would wind up marrying you in 7 years. I didn’t know I would write your son at war or drive around the country meeting you in truck stops. I didn’t know that your son would know mine and many other various things that have happened but this is how it has unfolded.”

“It’s true.”

“Okay, so right now I don’t have the ambition to do anything with that book. I don’t know why I don’t but I don’t. I am willing to wait for things to mature, I can tell you that but outside of that I have no idea. Right now my motivation is to do as good a job as I possibly can with these consultations and I don’t know why. It may be there is something better I should be doing, something smarter to do with my time but if there is I don’t know what it is because this is what I think I am supposed to do.”

“Well it just seem you worked so hard on that and it would take so little to get it ready to publish.”

“I know but I am not moved to do that.  It may be hard to understand if someone has the ambition to write a book or be a published author, but I don’t have that ambition. That’s not why I wrote that thing. I wrote it because I thought I was supposed to write it. I wrote it in service. I wrote it to co-operate with the universe. I wrote it because I thought it was the right thing to do and that’s all. That is the only reason I wrote it – I thought I was supposed to.”

“It seems like a lot of work…”

“I don’t know why you don’t understand this. You yourself have 9 years of college and no… accepted credentials. People tell you exactly what you are telling me. You get bitched out all the time. Why don’t you finish and do this and this and this.  You don’t have that ambition, that’s why.”

“I got what I wanted out of that college.”

“I got what I wanted out of writing that book.”

“Okay.”

“And further, this is just for now. I don’t know what is going to happen. We’re getting married, I didn’t know that would develop. I have been writing on my blog about my childhood some recently.  Not a lot, but some.  I don’t know why, it’s just came up organically which is the only way I like things to come up.  Don’t get me wrong. I will push a boulder up a hill but I have to know it’s my job to do. I have to be motivated by something inside of me but anyway, we don’t know what is happening. I can die and Vid can publish that book.”

“Vid is not going to publish that book.”

“He may. And maybe it will pay for his college and he’ll go on from there to have his life.  Would that not be worth the effort I made 10 years prior?  I think it would be. You just don’t know what is going to happen. Like Kathleen and the Deer Hunter, life unfolds as it damned well pleases in most cases.”

“I agree.”

“Good. Because I work on these consultations now and i do my best.  I have a total commitment to it and if there is something else I am supposed to do, I expect it to reveal to me and if it does, I will respond.  I’m sorry but I just have no other way to navigate this world outside of intuition and instinct.  Logic is applied to carry something out but as far as ambition goes, mine comes from ethereal sources and I don’t think there is anything I can do about this. I just trust when it is time for me to do something, the universe will let me know.  I will feel it just when I held that flier in my hand that day, this stuff is hard to miss…”

Do you have a philosophy for living?