Month: August 2014

The Name’s The Thing: findingenvirons

Playing Dungeons and Dragons is something I enjoyed as a child. I named my Twitter findingenvirons. My WordPress is findingenvirons1. The name findingenvirons is two words, finding environs. The first initial of each of the two words combined is Fe, the designation for iron. But that isn’t the reason.

cemetery_wilderness8058The idea of finding environs refers to mapping. I had a basic nineteen-eighties edition of the game Dungeons and Dragons. As a matter of fact, naming game characters is part of the game, but that’s not the reason for findingenvirons, instead of my actual name or the name of my organization. The reason is that in 1987, the game company TSR, Inc, published the volume In Search of Adventure, by Aaron Allston. It was culled from game dungeons that had preceded and remade into an expanded game format for the purpose of playing Dungeons and Dragons.

It was fascinating. In Search of Adventure was about going from the town of Threshold to the city of Specularum. The way through the wilderness between the two dominions was threefold and fraught with peril.

In Threshold, there was a merchant named Clifton Caldwell. He had a small castle controlled by monster goblins, an example of the game. Meeting the goblins there was the game.

Another possibility for gameplay was going to the desert to play in a sand city, which was elaborate and dangerous. The sand city was a long way around between Threshold and Specularum.

It was a complex city in the desert, with many hazards. It provided many hours of play.

A famous tournament among players of the game was provided as well. In this case, the game took place in a forest where witches held sway over a fantastic castle that stood tall in the sky where lived a fabled dragon. The witches’ castle was rife with danger, and the tournament from the mainstay of the game’s popularity could be recreated for fun.

If the game was a success, and the players were good at the game, the city of Specularum would be found and the evil guild The Veiled Society would challenge the players. There was intrigue in Specularum, and saving the life of Archduke Stefan was ultimately the order of the day, as the heroic players walked hand in hand with royalty.

These adventures were all in the context of playing Dungeons and Dragons.

So, finding environs to me is safety, and findingenvirons is the name of my Twitter, and a year and a half later findingenvirons1 is the name of my WordPress. Why the 1? The number one is a homonym to won and my WordPress parallels the idea of finding environs won, for the times the players of my childhood game earned their safety and accolades, in the grand duchy of Allston’s In Search of Adventure book.

Some of my best times having fun as a child were behind my cardboard game screen rolling polyhedral dice playing Dungeons and Dragons.

New Wrinkles: ten years older than you were

Sometimes you can’t help but wonder what the bloggers of today go through when they reach a certain point in their lives.   At some point, life as an adult becomes more about taking care of others than actually raising your children (or at least learning to be OK with finally being an adult yourself). This can make family holidays fraught, and expanding on your own brood extraordinarily difficult.

Losing ten years in the wink of an eye would be a dramatic life change. If I were ten years older than I am now, I would be forty-seven years old. If my life hadn’t changed in all that time, I wonder if I would be able to steer my life.

If all of a sudden I were forty-seven, what would I do? Maybe I’d sign up for online dating, filling out my profile with such designations as:

Age: 47

Seeking: a woman

My occupation: cemetery volunteer and social media addict. Facebook would be as much interesting as it is in my thirties!

Interests: Watching the EastEnders serial

Enjoying the wisdom of getting old

Hopes for the future: Keeping aware of changes and developments in the world

And so on.

I’d be aware of the shorter length of time left in my life. I’d want to pay more attention to what’s printed in the Saturday paper, instead of hurrying through it. My astrology chart designation would seem all the more pressing, I think.

Try this and try that–I would try to be more aware that there is only so much time in the day and it goes in the wink of an eye.

Other than looking for love, I’d be all the more set on my vocation. There would be fewer opportunities, I believe, so getting additional education would be all the more remote a possibility.

Upgrading a skill set would be all the more unfathomable as well. But I think I’d be satisfied with what I’ve managed to do so far. I’d be all the more persistent.

Maybe something like that would go on my dating profile!

I don’t think I’d be any keener than I am on the ongoing changes in technology; I’d be all the more typical growing old, putting my faith in the past instead of the future. I know I would write on my profile that I want to stay informed about what’s new. Still, I think as a guy I’d be saying that in order to demonstrate a certain character of the rube in my personality, seasoned by the years but not necessarily completely astute.

I think I would want to devote some time to reading good literature. I am sure there are many fascinating books, and in my late forties, I would want to delve into more than I have.

I wouldn’t be optimistic that I would learn much more than I have, because time spent in a book can go in the wink of an eye. That being said, there’s an illumination that goes with looking at the pages of essential books and fun books, and strange books.

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Live in the moment and be happy there

Coaching Positive Performance

Coach and trainer Carthage Buckley reminded me this year on the Internet that Wayne Dyer wrote in Dyer’s book Your Erroneous Zones that guilt and worry are useless emotions. Carthage writes this in a Coaching Positive Performance post discussing goals. Carthage argues in the post there is no goal worth too much sacrifice.

Even if I’d missed the last ten years of my life, at the age of only forty-seven, I would still find happiness in what remained to be lived.

Of course, at this time, I’m still only 37. If the next ten years disappear somehow, I will try not to be too disappointed. At later stages of life, there are still many joys to experience.

You might know more about those joys than I do! Ten years is a long time, but in human life, it can go all too quickly: in the wink of an eye.

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