The Ghosts from the Moors.

Many years ago I could have been living in Ireland. Dublin to be exact. A path had been created - better put, I had created a path to study abroad. University College Dublin. I had created....

The program would span two years; these years would be spent traveling throughout Ireland, Scotland and many parts of the UK. The emphasis would be on the infrastructure, history, Government and religious concepts and history. It would be site-seeing at its FINEST.

This was a dream I had since a young boy of fourteen - sitting at my parents dinner table announcing, "I WILL BE OUT OF HERE AT 18!" My mom giggled and my dad couldn't have been bothered by it, but THIS trip is exactly what I had meant. To get out, to see the world, to see all it had to offer from the good, the ugly and the magnificence and elegance of those two concepts beautifully molded together in the human experience.... I CRAVE(D) it....

I had created at path and it was paid for. My grants had all been accepted, my out of pocket was manageable. All that was needed was a solid, wool flat cap, pea coat and a personalized Imperial with a Claddagh.

Those years have haunted me...

A ghostly figure in the hallway of my life, the shadow looms, frozen in place. Consistently and infinitely stuck in a moment that never was, but almost. It lives in and galavants through the moors of my mind, methodically dancing at times to a rhythm in the song of "why?" "Why did I not take that trip...?", "What could have been...?"

My mind has played the movie reel of that life out, time and time again. The questions loom and the romance of such freedom, such adventure have been loaded to the trailer of regret in my life. Hitched eternally as a reminder to the load of wanting possibilities our lives will forever haul. The ache my soul feels can't be expressed adequately enough to convey to you how badly I wanted that trip. How badly I wanted to add that to my story.

That potential in Dublin will forever live in my mind and my mind only.

This is one experience left on the table. This one experience, while large, is not the end-all, be-all of my entire life. I just missed it. That doesn't replace the numerous stories and experiences created in its stead.

What is life but a collections of stories anyway? Grouped together to determine the overall of that soul that lived them. That created them and based on the ADVENTURE of them, the DARING of them determines the weight and significance of a "life well lived" and/or wasted.

When I started this post, it was originally going to be about quality mental habits - hence my opening story about UCD - but it has now morphed in to two concepts. YES I want to discuss the abundance of tools one can utilize to beef your mental toughness and fortitude. HOWEVER, the opportunity to talk about that and create a life that is well-lived have now bred itself onto these pages.

The second picture on this post is of Irish moors - as a young boy reading "Wuthering Heights" I fell in love with the idea of the Yorkshire moors. Ah the mystery in them, the magisterial presence from the aesthetic of them felt as if they were a portal into another dimension.

This filled me with a burning desire to want to stand in them. To run through a fog so thick I could see it on my clothes. Feel it on my skin and for my spirit to dance amongst them and the ghosts of its past.

Why would we not want to do something so open, so poetic? So free? To breath in the air of borderline, stark mad experience? But how does one build this? How does one create a life that, IF, one had to write a book about it - others would want to read and couldn't put down?

Egotistical or not - if my sons came to you and said, "this is a book about my dad and his life..." I want you to be fucking enthralled by its content. I want you to cry, I want you to be filled with a passion to pursue your adventure. I want you to be enraged, I want you to be incensed. I want you to be so fucking jealous you set out on a war path, charged by the war-drums of desire and intrigue from the very depths of your God-crafted soul.

To do these things you have to be one with you. You MUST practice self belief and self-belief is born between the legs of Mother Failure. Because failure requires you to rise and to do this, you must grab yourself up. Lift your head and see what has settled between the particles of dust in time.

I rarely focus on that trip. I rarely walk through those moors in my mind. I don't have to. My focus on that dream has changed; the image of it has contorted into something entirely different. What was will never be and that's just perfectly, fine, because I've made it so. I say it's so. Now, instead of going to Ireland by myself as a very young man; I will take my two sons.

I will watch as they breath in that air, I will watch as their eyes light up with the sites of a country so beautiful you can almost feel their centuries of ancestry amongst you. I will see as they laugh and smile at the common folk and my boys attempting to understand their drunken accents. I will tear up seeing them speed off to the next BIG thing they discover - because as they do so, I KNOW it will be a shinny, harmonically hued memory-feather in the cap of their lives.

It's just that simple, isn't it? It's just that fragile - the way we approach a perception of a past want or even a past experience. What glasses you don will, ultimately, be the lense into which you utilize to see the future. The opportunity to create rocket fuel for your own growth is dependent upon you allowing ghosts to be just that, ghosts. Memories are these. We breath life into them when we hold on to them too long and they will haunt each and every step we attempt to take going forward.

As I sat down today, I wanted to paint a picture of mental weight lifting. But, sometimes, there's a bigger picture we don't see - sometimes there's a meaning behind a direction we take that isn't initially part of our original outline. This is just life. This post is a small paradox.

J.L. Copeland