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Nevertheless, if you’re like me, it really captures your imagination and doesn’t let go. It just gets right to the heart of what we as men yearn for, deep down.
It’s about making our own rules…which in turn can be subject to change at any time, because we feel like it.
Now, if you’re a man of character who has a cornerstone belief system that involves self-respect, treating women right and leaving the world a better place than you found it, you don’t see such a concept as negative or morally bereft.
Nowadays, however, most of us find ourselves by default living in a world where someone else “laid down the law” in our lives, and we’ve simply followed it.
Tragically, even those who believe in a Higher Power are often no exception. They’re following someone else’s rules like sheep instead of following their conscience.
As you may know, we “worldschool” our children. Their field trips are to other continents, and they contend the national BMX racing circuit without a hall pass. And for the record, both of them are way ahead of their grade level in their studies.
They’re happy kids who lead quite fulfilling lives, and we as parents are similarly happy and fulfilled. It’s a perpetually amazing and effective adventure in learning for all of us.
Not long ago I met someone who said he disagreed with homeschooling in general.
He explained, “I don’t know. Kids need to learn a routine in life of waking up in the morning from Monday through Friday, following instructions and working hard. That will better prepare them for having a job someday.”
Exactly.
It’s a training program for following the “law” and conforming to it.
Back in the early 1990s I shocked my family and friends by leaving mid-Atlantic suburbia behind and moving to Yuma, AZ.
Literally everyone thought I had lost my mind.
But I count those years spent in the “Wild, Wild West” as among the best of my life. My friends and I felt like we were in a Sam Peckinpah movie, except we were riding sportbike motorcycles through the desert instead of horses.
I wasn’t “supposed” to be doing that. I was supposed to be climbing a corporate ladder somewhere.
And make no mistake, at some point I indeed went into the business world, working for a Big Corporation.
That’s cool. It was my choice. I experienced that lifestyle.
But it wasn’t long before I felt a yearning desire to “break” that “law” and “lay down” a different one.
Today, here I am…in the Santone region of the “Wild West”, still living my purpose by my own design. Not someone else’s purpose.
For the record, everyone I knew thought I was stark, raving nuts this time around also.
Well, everyone except my wife. She thought it was absolutely great that I had a purpose and ambition to change the world. She was wildly attracted to that and still loves me for it.
Interestingly enough, I was never a fan of Western movies until after I lived in Yuma. To me they were nothing but boring, slow- paced dialogue punctuated by all-too-occasional action.
But nowadays I love them. I mean, I freaking LOVE ‘em. I find myself fascinated, if not mesmerized.
There’s no question that Yuma in 1892 was far rougher around the edges than it was by 1992.
So I wonder, had I lived back in the 1800s, would I have had the sheer balls to leave the mid-Atlantic and seek my fortune in the “Wild, Wild West”?
God, I hope so.
Those guys must have felt even more Invincible then. “Laying down the law and breaking it” wasn’t just a slogan, it was a way of life.
That leads to the ultimate question: Where and when did everything change?
Or has it, necessarily…regardless of what the “toxic masculinity” media would have us believe?
What if you could be a bold, confident, irresistibly influential and even dominant man…only perhaps without getting shot at quite as often as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday?
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