How to Fly....

Before you get the wrong idea, even though I could teach you how to fly, I'm not currently qualified with CASA, so forget that. I can however, teach you how to fly metaphorically speaking, and while you may learn a bit about flying aircraft, riding motorbikes, and being a man, that's the goal of this blog.

To begin with, I'll bore you with a bit of my background - not because I want to - but because it will provide context, and context is important.

Nearly 60 years ago, I was born....... Okay, that's probably too much!
During my life so far - I was fortunate enough to have grown up on a farm and learned to drive before I was out of primary school.
- Loved my horse - because she was the fastest thing around on four legs.
- Learned to deal with being the only dark skinned kid in school
- and learned what being an Aussie really was - fair dinkum!
Then the family moved into the city, and I learned to deal with a whole different breed of people - most of whom had no idea about practical reality - but that didn't stop them from confidently flying off on a tangent to it - and rarely with disastrous results! In the beginning, I wasn't so sure they had it wrong - maybe I was deluded - but the following decades revealed the truth. Because I wasn't certain of my facts, I meekly kept my thoughts to myself until a year or two ago. Contrast that with most commentators today, and I'm a late bloomer! So many people seem confident in their understandings that they can front the media and speak with confident authority - but I know they're full of it.

It was only when I ventured away from the well-trodden path, that I was treated to the real thing - truth. Seems the mainstream diet is purely artificial, and I know that's not good for any animal.

During the first two decades or so, I spent a fair bit of time observing the modern medical system in Australia, due to being asthmatic, and even as a kid, I could see significant flaws in the system. As an adult, nothing in the last 40 years has changed that initial assessment.

Things went normally for a while until I left school at the age of 16, part of the way through year 11, because I couldn't see any point in it. At first, I worked at an engineering firm making parts for trucks, but the pay was $40 per week, and I hated the cold cycle to work in the winter, so I left for Cairns, where an old bikie boyfriend of my sister's was working on the sugar cane.

It wasn't long before I got work at Aloomba, as a bin-hauler, earning three times the money, with the glorious tropical weather as an added bonus. After that season, I returned home and worked there for the off-season, then returned the following year. That was when the first major event happened that would change my life, and how I would view things.

One night, early in the morning, the Cane farmer came down to the barracks for me. The Police in my home town were on the phone, and before I even answered the call, knew what had happened. My father had shot my mum, and four siblings, before shooting himself. Even now, I can't say why I knew what had happened, but things just seemed to indicate something drastic had happened, so my mind flew through the possibilities, and came up with a family tragedy of this magnitude.

I won't bore you with the details, but that's what caused me to diligently "prove all things, hold fast that which is good." Throughout this blog, I'll regularly provide quotes and lines from books that I've collected over my life. That one's from the bible, I believe, but since I haven't read it all, I can't be sure. Just because I quote the bible, don't get the idea that I will be promoting any one source of truth, because there are many bits here and there. There is only one reason why I still remember them - because they integrate with reality perfectly.

That's what I determined to do following that event, because I simply didn't want to make the same mistake.