Thought-provoking insights from Hugh Howey

Best-selling independent author Hugh Howey has come up with some very thought-provoking insights into his life and how he's lived it (so far).  Here's an excerpt.

Comparing life to a road we travel is so obvious that it’s become cliche. So my revelation from a car crash as a youth and all those road trips was this: The way to make a life feel long was a combination of newness and danger. Seeking danger seemed like a bad idea — more a recipe for a shortened life than a perceived longer one. But what about newness? I decided to explore this further.

And what I noticed right off the bat is that for most people, life is not so much a journey as it is a commute. We like to pretend that life is some open road we explore, but it’s really a path we carve into the pavement, worn there by habit, or the back and forth of routine. I wrote about this in I, Zombie, a horror book primarily concerned with the horrors of a habituated life.

A life of commute scared me. It meant traveling the same road back and forth every day. Wouldn’t my brain then shut off and allow me to coast, managing curves without even thinking about them? Wouldn’t my life speed right by like the drive between my house and my best friend Nathan’s?

I wanted a life that would feel longer, a path that stimulated my mind by constantly feeding it new scenery, new experiences, and new information.

. . .

Any adventure or opportunity that came my way, I said “yes” ... The more uncomfortable and new, the more likely I was to go for it. Despite my fears. Despite the craving for comfort and ease.

Friends and family used to tell me that strange opportunities like this just seemed to come my way. Curious about this, I took a deeper look at what was happening, and I saw the same opportunities were there for them as well. The difference was that I was actively seeking them and always taking them.

There's much more at the link.

Mr. Howey certainly made me think.  I hope you'll enjoy his thoughts too.  (He's currently preparing to live aboard a catamaran yacht that's being completed for him in South Africa.  You can read about his purchase and the adventure of building it at his 'boat build blog'.  It's a lot of fun - even more so for me because I know the town where it's being built.)

Peter