One of the things about life is that we never really know what’s next. Most people know the saying by Scottish poet Robert Burns, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” Most of us can also think of one or more things in our lives that confirm its truth. In many cases, at the time our plans are going astray, we are too close to the trees to see the forest. We notice the change only in retrospect. I will summarize my experience so that you can see if you notice the ways in which my life took a variety of unplanned twists and turns.
I did not do well my first two years in high school. I was not only a poor student, but also was getting into trouble in a variety of ways. I learned how to hypnotize people early and spent time I could have been studying entertaining my friends. My grades were abysmal, so my parents took me out of public school and sent me to a private school, where I learned self-discipline. I started college as a chemistry major because I had enjoyed high-school chemistry. Calculus, however, was a hurdle I couldn’t get over. Fortunately, I also enjoyed reading and writing, so I was comfortable switching my major to English, adding minors in psychology and sociology. I also changed colleges, not once but twice, ending up at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where I knew and marched with the social activists promoting civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War. (If you’re old enough to remember the music, you remember what those days were like.) During this time, I knew others who were also interested in hypnosis, hands-on healing, and extrasensory perception.
I had finished my undergraduate degree and started grad school when the Army decided it needed me for the Vietnam War effort. My draft board was in California, and I was attending school in Illinois, so unlike many students at the time, I was not eligible for a deferment. After basic training, I started working as a company clerk at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. After that, I was sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, for medic training. During that training, one of the sergeants asked, “Who here can type?” I raised my hand. Once again, I became a company clerk. I went to Vietnam as a clerk rather than a combat medic, and I suspect that greatly influenced my experience of the war.
I continued my study of literature and, on the basis of my grades and previous business experience, I was selected for a graduate teaching assistantship in the business communication program. I enjoyed teaching and the subject. The Vietnam War had increased university and grad school enrollments, so new Ph.D.s in English became the proverbial “dime a dozen.” In my class and the one just before we had a total of 64 new Ph.D.s. Of that group, 4 of us were able to get jobs teaching at the university level. I was one of them, and I was hired to teach business communication rather than literature. My first job doing that was in the English Department at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
I had been at the University of Florida for less than a year when I received an offer to teach business communication at Western Michigan University, where business communication was in the College of Business rather than in a department of English. I discovered how much higher salaries were in “B schools” than they were in English departments, and I moved. I spent the next 30 years teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in business communication and related subjects at Western Michigan University (WMU). During this time, I discovered Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), and that rekindled my interest in hypnosis and sparked an interest in Energy Medicine. I was able to persuade WMU to fund a research project that allowed me to study the alleviation of fears and phobias about tests and performance. The grant paid for much of the training I received in NLP. That study was just beginning when I was asked to become the chair of the department. I did that for six years before retiring.
The previous summary doesn’t indicate that my interest in alternative medicine was sparked by friends who had illnesses that weren’t responding well to traditional Western Medicine and my own less-than-satisfactory experiences with Western medical practitioners. Along the way, Debra and I started teaching NLP and Energy Medicine and wrote manuals to facilitate teaching and learning. We’ve had some “bumps in the road” along the way. When I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome several years ago, I did some online research to see what was being done for those with my symptoms. At the time, physicians were prescribing a combination of heavy-duty pain medicines and antidepressants. I opted for acupuncture and additional nutritional support. I recovered. I consider myself “holistic” and recognize that Western Medicine does some things really well. I had surgery for cataracts, and I’m in the process of arranging for surgery for a hernia.
If you think about your own life, note the way that everything you have done made sense at the time you did it. If you’re like me, you adapted to your current circumstances rather than setting a firm course for a lifetime. Modern steam ships often set a course and then maintain it. This doesn’t work all the time, however: Remember the Titanic. Sailing vessels had to “tack” (align with the wind) to make progress in a specific direction, and a sailing vessel would have been tacking when the iceberg appeared. I suspect that most of us “tack” our way through life. We may know more-or-less where we want to go, but we discover that we can’t get there in a straight line. We can recognize the progress we’ve been making only in retrospect, and it may only be in retrospect that we can see our soul purpose in life.
In her article this month, Debra mentioned the recent workshop with Dr. Mary Jo Bulbrook. Workshops are not only a good way to learn new things, but also a good way to discover when you need to “tack” in a new direction. I have always known, for example, that Debra is more gifted than I when it comes to Energy Medicine, but what I saw demonstrated in the workshop persuaded me that I need to tack away from energy-based healing back in the direction of Neurolinguistic Programming and hypnosis, both of which are based primarily on language. When you consider the various twists and turns in my life, you’ll doubtless notice that—regardless of the tacking I’ve done—the general course of my life has been language-centered.
Regardless of the twists and turns in your life, what has been the general course in your life? And where will you go next?