‘Adventuring,’ my dad called it, when I was a kid, when he’d round up the family to head out on an adventure, somewhere.
Out where we were in the Midwest, our adventuring wasn’t on high mountain peaks or along dense forest trails. Usually, it was in a park, near the city, along winding paths, that, in my imagination, were paths in parched desert terrain or tropical everglades.
When I grew up and stumbled, somewhat, into a career, I found I could go on adventuring… this time in the world of business, where I worked for just shy of 39 years.
I’d studied journalism, but wound up in corporate PR, where my adventuring was along a trail of synapses, you might say, in the psyche of my fellow human beings. That’s a fancy way of describing tapping into the synapses in the brains of human beings, to heighten their awareness and shape their opinion.
That was PR, as I got to know it.
PR can be very cool and fulfilling, especially when you believe in a business firm’s visions and missions… and its products and services, and its leadership, and good deeds. So for nearly four decades, I’d go adventuring along many trails, chock full of the thinking, reasoning and contemplating synapses in human noggins.
Sometimes my work really worked out, and sometimes it didn’t go, exactly, as planned. That’s the thing with heightening awareness, with getting what you’d like folks to be thinking about to stick around, some, in their synapses… and each of us humans has an almost unfathomable number of those tiny things taking in and processing stuff, constantly.
If you could get peoples’ synapses to wrap around some nifty new service, or product, or, perhaps, a company’s good deeds, that was some seriously satisfying adventuring.
Then, afterward, after all those years in business, I went on adventuring, but differently… adventuring across the Rubicon, in a way.
Rather than pitching publicity to journalists, I journeyed over to the media, in a way. Not as a journalist, exactly, but as a guest writer, hoping to heighten awareness of the human condition, I suppose, which, often, gets all caught up in conceptions and preconceptions, and misconceptions.
There are so many varieties of all the conceptions we all seem to have, but not nearly as many of those many conceptions, as the 125 trillion synapses in our brains.
With so many of those little devils doing their thing, there’s plenty of work to be done, and a whole lot of trails to keep adventuring on.