The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Well — a “deep subject” haha — on this first day of 2022, the good news is we made it on another revolution ride around the Sun.

The million dollar question now is: What less traveled MoJo road stretches out ahead in this journey of life?

The poet Robert Frost found himself at a crossroads in a yellow wood.

He took the one less traveled by, a grassy road of nonconformity, and said, “that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

That line often echos in my head as I travel down the MoJo road I’ve chosen.

Another author, M. Scott Peck, wrote a massive best seller about a road less traveled. Peck was a psychiatrist who inspired millions with his advice on how to live, although he didn’t often live by his own advice.

M. Scott Peck, Self-Help Author, Dies at 69

His book The Road Less Traveled, which took a few years to catch on, kicked off with an obvious declarative thought.

“Life is difficult.”

No shit, Sherlock, to borrow a cliché and a reference to the fictional mystery solving English detective, Sherlock Holmes.

If I were to take the time to tell you all the less traveled roads and trails I’ve taken, and pass on everything I learned going down them, that would fill an entire book.

Oh, wait. I already wrote and published that book.

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I never became one of those loyal fans who adored Peck, mainly because he couches his secret formula of success or happiness in terms of “discipline” and Christianity.

I’ve never been a big fan of discipline or Christianity.

My early lessons from those who wanted to force discipline on me came from big, fat football coaches with large wooden paddles, some with carved holes in them, specifically designed to make red whelps on the butts of rebel adolescents who liked to skip school, drink beer and smoke like Huckleberry Finn. I’m not sure that was just tobacco in Tom Sawyer’s corn-cob pipe.

But Peck did know a thing or two about human psychology, so he preached delayed gratification.

I learned about that as an undergraduate in college, but never fully took to the philosophy. I always figured we might as well have as much fun as we can now. Why wait to fulfill our American Constitutional calling in the “pursuit of happiness?”

Other self-help gurus and pop-psychologists preach about “living in the moment.”

I do think there is some merit to other ideas Peck focused on, like accepting responsibility, a dedication to truth and honesty, and balancing ones life.

As a doctoral candidate in the early days of the internet, I wrote a maxim to live by. It’s taken from the idea of how to survive a sudden storm in a sail boat.

“When the going gets rough, keep an even keel and head for the beach. In other words, live by Wilson’s First Social Law: For every high there is an equal and opposite low. This is the social equivalent of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Think about it.”

Southerner/FAST

In those days I was more a fan of the beach, however. These days I’m more partial to mountains, especially in the summertime.

Covid Pandemic

With the Covid pandemic raging for the past couple of years, it’s been hard to make a long-term plan. It’s been enough to follow the light of what we already know about how to survive and have fun, just to get by and keep up with all the news and wait to see what happens next.

With the Omicron variant now taking over as the top threat to human health, we all have no choice but to hunker down a little while longer with vaccine shots, boosters, hand sanitizer and masks and make it through January, February and March to see if the threat from the virus fades.

If it does, the economy should also improve now that we have a trillion dollar infrastructure plan to implement. Bring on those federal dollars, and put people back to work.

With any luck, we are looking at taking a cross country trip out West in the spring, although we plan to be back in D.C. by May. But it’s really too early to say whether we will make it to camp at that diamond mine in Arkansas in March, along with a tour of Colorado, landing in Coulterville, California in the shadow of Yosemite in April. That’s the tentative plan anyway.

First we have to make it through the rest of this winter. As they say on the “tube,” stay tuned.

As always, it’s going to be one hell of a ride. We would not have it any other way. You?

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