I have been a proud member of navigating life for little bit over a year now. Let me first start out by writing that I have come to realize that even when I make mistakes, I am human. When I came to understand and accept my mistakes, it made my life a little easier to understand and made me accept the people around me better
As for what I'm working on this week, building a loyal crew and having a solid rudder. I'm slowly learning that you build your life around no one, and criticism should not matter. In my case, my father was my best friend. He was my boss. I worked and saw him at home. You get used to having certain people and circumstances in your life. When he passed, my world was turn up side down with depression. Addictions took over for a long time.
I have realized that no matter how depressed you get, no matter how much you drink, you are never going to bring back anyone you love. Instead, you need to go back to the principles that matter. Principles like the ones my dad taught me.
My dad always said, “Never give up, work hard, go school, and always be of service when you can.†His teachings, and what I have learned through the fourteen rules, have made a tremendous in pact on my life both professionally and personally. The power of focus and goal setting is something that is a must. It truly is amazing when you sit down and you write down your goals. When you take action on your goals on a daily basis, you truly get somewhere. Without an accurate map, you will never known where you want to go on the river.
Tony Perez
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When a loved one dies, it leaves a big hole in our lives. However, that person lives on in our memories and in the values that they taught us.
We honor our loved ones by using those values to chart our course and to navigate our river.
My son taught me so much about living and dying while he lived with a terminal cancer. He did the absolute best he could everyday, and he was positive to the end. When someone asked him how he was his answer was always, “I’m doing’ fine”.
He had an old Volkswagen camper van that I had given him when he moved from Hawaii to the mainland. He drove that van up the Alcan highway twice and had taken it to every state in the United States except New Mexico. His last goal was to take his van and visit New Mexico.
It was probably foolish, but when he was told he had only weeks to live. We got a big supply of morphine, he crawled in the van and we headed for New Mexico. I remember stopping at a desert national Monument, with a beautiful stream flowing through golden aspens. The park was setup for wheelchairs, and we rolled down to a bluff overlooking the stream. He sat there for an hour, enjoying the view, dozing and enjoying the warm fall sun. On the way back to the car, he made me stop so he could watch a spider in it's dew encrusted web.
That evening, we reached Gallup New Mexico, and he sat in the cold, clear desert evening watching the scarlet orb of the sun dip below the horizon. We went in to the motel and use their pool. It had been months since he had been able to stand on his own, and with the water support, he luxuriated in once again being mobile. I helped them float around the pool, and he stood at the deep end of the pool holding onto the ladder and doing push-ups against the water’s resistance.
That night, he died in his sleep. He had accomplished everything in life he had set out to do. He was cremated and his ashes where placed under a tree we planted on his favorite hiking trail in Los Angeles, in the family plot in Oregon, at the top of a rain forest waterfall by his sister on Maui and, by his request, at our favorite surfing spot in Kailua Bay.
I regard death as being the last great adventure where I will find out if there is anything after having had the great privilege of life.
We live on in the memory of our loved ones. We honor our parents by living with strong values and by navigating our river of life to the very best of our abilities.
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