Hello my friends, and welcome! 

I have wanted, for some time now, to share some of my thoughts with more people than just my family.  I also want another place to store my stories that I have experienced and learned from, and continue to draw analogies from other than within the pages of my journal.  So it’s here where I will share some of the most common everyday objects and experiences and show how through some reflection and pondering on them, they can represent some enlightening and motivating gold nuggets to life and help me see clearer, gain better relationships and improve my results in many different aspects of life.

Since this is post numero uno, I figure this should be my introduction.  My prelude to help you gain a better understanding as to who I am and build up a little rapport with you and provide a little background that will help you relate to me, and hopefully answer some of the questions you have like “well, why should I listen to this guy?” 

I’m the oldest brother of 5 children that grew up in a small rural community of Northern Utah.  Small would be an understatement since we didn’t get our first traffic light within our city limits until I was in high school.  The light was a long time coming since it was placed at the intersection that crosses a 4-lane highway that was essentially the main road that people came and left on in our small valley.  Most of the time crossing that road wasn’t too bad, you just had to shoot the gaps.  However in the winter, especially in the bitter cold early morning hours when visibility wasn’t too good already, the fog/inversion/cloud-of-methane-death-from-cow-manure made it way more difficult to see.  There were some times the fog would get so thick that we couldn’t make out the lights of oncoming traffic until they were about 40 yards away.  So you can imagine how this could make for an awesome start to the mornings as you sat at the intersection, rolling down the windows in the car, closing your eyes and just listening for the gaps from the sounds of engines and the tire treads on the pavement.  And because you had to have it be as quiet as possible, you had to turn the radio and, more painfully, the heater off in order to know when it was safe to shoot the gap in order to go to work and school.  And that’s probably why the light had to be installed as soon as it did, because the local high school was in the next town over.  Now they didn’t teach us in the driver’s ed class we attended to roll the windows down and listen for the gap, it was just something you eventually learned to do especially since your buddy carpooling to school with you got his car totaled since he didn’t roll his window down and met the business end of car going 50 on their way to town.   It basically turned into a modern day Charles Darwin experiment with new drivers.  Only those vehicles with drivers that could tolerate being cold for 3-5 minutes with the windows down in -10 degree weather survived.  Who needs coffee in the morning when you get to have the adrenaline rush of possibly losing your life and probably your car every morning?  Not this guy. 

So the community finally decided to put in a traffic light, even though they kind of prided themselves as being a small community without one, but it was time. 

One of my goals with this blog is to help get you out of the fog of life where there are a lot of us still waiting at the intersections and crossroads on our journeys waiting for the sound that it’s safe to continue.  What I eventually learned later on in life is that the higher in elevation I got, the thinner the fog/inversion smog became.  So when I was in the “higher” spots of the valley, I could see further down the road and could actually rely on my sight to know when it was safe to cross instead of freezing out me and my passengers because we had to roll the windows down and listen.  The same applies in life.  The higher we take our lives in getting out of the gunk of life (the fog), the clearer our vision on how to reach our goals become. 

Thanks for starting this journey with me, and hopefully I can be a mere stepping stone in being able to take you higher and start “seeing” the road your journey is currently on, but also to be able to see the beauty this life has to offer. 

So that’s just a small snippet of kind of the circumstance I grew up in.  And because I don’t want to turn you away by going on for hours introducing myself, I’m going to save some more for the next couple of posts to introduce you to more of myself.  But in closing, I do want to say this again.  Welcome my friends to A Higher U.