Official Election Tour Campaign Launch
Christopher B.
Founder, Magical Year Retreats. Human thriving, performance and transitions consultant. Interviewer, Author, Athlete, Explorer.
I'm very excited to launch the attached Kickstarter campaign and invite you to take a look. While titled an Election Podcast Tour, it is far, far more. Fourteen years ago I was 48-years-old and co-parenting two teenage children. A few years earlier, in agonizing pain during my third trip to an emergency room, a doctor finally ordered a CT and hours later I had emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder.
Soon after that, I left an unhappy marriage during which my wife lost both her parents, and my mother passed away just months before our daughter was born. Great losses can bring people together or pull them apart and in our case, along with other issues, it was the latter, and thankfully we co-parented very well for many years.
I felt young and looked forward to a fresh start, co-parenting my children, and hopefully another relationship and more kids. Instead, I became ill and went from a 6'1 190 lb. athlete to a skeletal 145. During the next four years I experienced the first of many astounding errors and mistakes while in the healthcare system. Finally, a test was ordered and I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, an autoimmune disorder. Within a few months of being gluten free I felt markedly better though in hindsight it became evident healing took much longer.
The Great Recession soon arrived and every asset class plummeted, some friends lost their homes and businesses, and as a former journalist, it was one more of many things that didn't add up as being the country in which I grew up. I saw problems go unsolved, wages remain stagnant, homelessness become an issue, and more and more institutions were being called into question or failing in their missions.
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I had always planned on returning to writing, with an eye on non-fiction, book length works. During a summer while in college, my brother and I took a month-long road trip in my Volkswagen Beetle around the American West, from Bloomington, Indiana to the Southwest desert, on to LA, and up the coast to San Francisco. With waning power, we rebuilt the engine in my aunt's driveway in Walnut Creek before continuing on to backpack in Yosemite and Glacier National Park. From there it was a very long and beautiful drive east across the northern plains to the Boundary Waters. We canoed there for a week and then head south back to Bloomington.
The trip remains a visceral, beautiful memory to this day, and as I say about my travels and forthcoming book, Perimeter, An Odyssey, it was what would become a love affair with my country. Later, I would be influenced by Kerouac, Steinbeck, Peter Jenning's "Walk Across America," and more. So, sitting at my desk one morning, it became clear to me that to understand my country, I would need to travel it, talk with people, and hear about their experiences and thoughts. I could never have imagined that what I thought would result in a book a year or two later would instead lead to an over decade-long project that I am sharing with you at 3:43 a.m this morning, during this historic election season.
It has been an amazing journey. I look forward to sharing my final travels and interviews with you, my listeners, viewers, and readers. I hope you join me.
Founder, Magical Year Retreats. Human thriving, performance and transitions consultant. Interviewer, Author, Athlete, Explorer.
6 个月I will commit a faux pas and comment on my own article, as someone once said about Liking your own social media post, akin to a dog sniffing its own butt. On my bike ride to coffee after three hours of sleep, I thought about revealing my in-law's and mother's early deaths. My in-law's were only in their 70s, but looked old, as so many people then did. My mother died of breast cancer at only 50, her choice to go to Mexico as the actor Steve McQueen did proving a bad decision. She enjoyed a morning coffee and donuts, and was not very active. There was a lot of loss there in a very short time for my ex and I. After coffee I will train next to at least four seventy somethings and two men in their 80s all swimming their daily mile or even lifting weights. Them and people like Klaus Obermeyer unknowingly became my mentors, models for active, robust living. My friend Kenny is an 80-year-old trial attorney still in practice, and knocks out push ups to match his age. every day. There are no "secrets" to human performance and longevity, but there are places such as Aspen, what I term a micro-blue zone, where people live longer and healthier lives by simply having healthy movement built into their daily lives.