The Blue Ghost

Candy: Today was a great day!

We spent several hours touring the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, aka the Blue Ghost. This plane is one of about 10 that sit on her flight deck. We got to visit the bridge, eat at the Mess Deck cafe, and wander through the ship's hangars and other parts.

We also spent some more time at Barnes & Noble, reading and discussing various profundities. Tim spent more time with the book I referred to in yesterday's post, while I read most of a fascinating book entitled The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine.

Talk about right up my alley! It was encouraging to read about so many others who, like me, have been interested in too many things to settle on just one (in terms of a career). I've read a bunch of "find the right career for you" books in my lifetime, and for the first time I actually read something that applied to me.

The essence of the book was that focus is the key to making multiple passions work. The analogy used by the author was that of a wonderful ice cream shop, with hundreds of flavors of ice cream, gelato, frozen yogurt, and custard. For a Renaissance Soul (Lobenstine's phrase for someone who is multi-talented and passionate about many things, based on the Renaissance Man idea), being asked to "choose just one thing and stick with it" is like being told by the ice cream shop owner to pick one flavor and have only it forever.

The opposite aspect of her analogy is that without focus, the gazillion interests that a Renaissance Soul has are like being told by the shop owner to taste a little bit of each and every flavor in the store...overwhelming because you don't know where to begin.

The balance in the analogy is to try a four-flavor sampler that can be modified each time we visit the store. I found it really helpful to think about which activities I'd like to pursue next in those terms. The key is just to begin. Find a focus, put your sampler together (four activities) and begin pursuing them. Then modify or replace those activities with other passions as time goes by. That way it's not "one thing" nor is it too overwhelming because it's everything at once.

We then ate some great Mexican food and headed back into downtown Corpus Christi once darkness set in so that I could take some nighttime photos. It was a beautiful night, cool, and of course windy. Every day is windy here. :)

Thinking that we'll drive to the Rio Grande border towns tomorrow for the day. Hoping to find some great photo opportunities as well as some interesting artifacts.

Tim and Chase are both out cold tonight, and I'm about to join them. Hope you have a great Tuesday.