Burton 6.0
This is my first entry into Burton 6.0, which is the next phase of my life — one that is hopefully going to involve a lot of traveling and other things.
I'm actually using ChatGPT to help with this process. If that makes you abhorrent to this whole communication, so be it.
But where I am right now is feeling really good about life.
I haven't solved all my problems, but I have narrowed the gap between the way the world is and the way I think it should be.
In the past, I've spent a lot of time living in that very large space between the two — with a lot of frustration.
So I'm letting a lot of that go, and I'm forging ahead.
I'm planning on going into actual retirement. Right now I'm still working — sort of working — but I want to travel a lot more, spend more time in nature, ride the motorcycle, and do other things that I actually want to do.
So this is the beginning of Burton 6.0.
My first entry.
Let's see how it goes.
AI Vision of My Go Forward Plan
Brief explanation, more to come: This is me on a Can-Am Ryker 900 Rally. My dog companion, Rory, is riding on the back on a K9 Moto COCKPIT (inspired by Jess Stone and her German Shepard).
Random thoughts inspiring the creation of this new blog: A few recent events feel worth noting here, even if I'm not sure what they all mean yet. The death of my close friend Fred Menendez, who I've known for forty or fifty years, brought home how short life is. At the same time, I'm on the edge of what I hope is the next phase of my life: actually retiring, not just being officially retired. For me, that means time in nature, traveling with my pickup, a three-wheeled motorcycle that I can't fall off, my dog, and a lot of open road. I had a day recently that I think of as a glimpse of Nirvana. Not perfect bliss, but a moment of narrowing the gap between reality as it is, and the way I think it should be. I've lived a lot in that gap, getting frustrated when things don't work. Lately, I've had moments of seeing that frustration as just something that's happening inside me, rather than the whole truth. And even if I can't stop the reaction, I don't have to live inside it. Then a small thing- After Fred died, I tried to reach someone from an old friend group I only knew as Maxwell. I "mistakenly" contacted a different Maxwell, someone I knew from The ManKind Project. I went to a meeting and that night happened to be a memorial for a member who had just died. I don't know if I'll re-engage deeply with the group, but the timing felt right, like one of those little markers on the path. My current moto borrowed from a series of novels, is "Journey Before Destination." I'm starting to think that fulfillment, happiness, even nirvana has less to do with arriving and much more to do with how I travel.
Preview of upcoming perspectives: