04March2001 #0110.html

Emotional Baggage

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Dear Paul and Kate, Melanie and Jared, Bridget and Justin, Sara, Ben and Sarah, Heather, Audrey, Rachel, and Matt via hardcopy,

cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, Maxine Shirts via mail.

Welcome to "Thoughtlets." This is a weekly review of an idea, belief, thought, or words that will hopefully be of some benefit to you, my children, with an electronic copy to on-line extended family members. Any of you can ask me not to clutter your mail box at any time.

"I recall, in the midst of reconciling myself to being divorced, and to having totally failed at the only thing really important to me, reading a book or an article about others who had gone through the same struggle. One story particularly hit home, because the author talked about how for months after his divorce he had boxes stacked in his bedroom, and how much relief it brought when he got all of the boxes out of his bedroom. It probably wasn't the boxes that created the burdon, but the emotional baggage.

This struck home with me because of the 100+ boxes I have been moving around with me, from Cedar to Salt Lake to Cedar to Dallas to Missouri City to Katy to Utah to Houston, etc. From the garage to a storage shed to my parrents basement to my bedroom to the garage to ? I have referred to these boxes several times in these Thoughtlets (see: ../9725.html, ../9728.html, ../9730.html, ../9744.html, ../9823.html, ../9825.html, ../9831.html, ../9840.html, ../9841.html, ../9842.html, ../9917.html, ../9922.html, ../9923.html, ../9938.html, ../9947.html, ../0019.html, ../0035.html, ../0036.html, and ../0043.html). And these boxes don't even count the boxes of rocks, the cans of food storage, nor the emotional baggage which I still carry around with me.

Matt got a neat audio tape for Christmas by John Bytheway, a church youth speaker. It talks about one of his early scout camps, how one of the kids was hurt and the leader took them back home, leaving John in charge of the remaining scouts. One of these scouts was dying on the hike, and they almost all gave up. However they endured until they got to the lake, and as they were setting up camp this boy started to unload his back pack. It was full of cans of food from his pantry, cans which would never be used on a campout. The reason he was so tired and had such a hard time was all of the extra weight he was carrying in his back pack, which he didn't need to. John's message in this tape is simply how much extra effort do we spend carrying around stuff we don't need to? And of course, the weightier part is the emotional baggage we all carry around.

I remember when we were getting scouts ready for Philmont, and we would put one or two of the 5 pound slabs of limestone out by the rose garden in their back pack. It was great for conditioning. However, I'm not sure it does us much good to carry around emotional baggage like `all of the times Mom left us and went out on a date,' or `how deep the fingernails cut and how bad the scars on my arm are,' or `how mean' so and so `was,' and `how they used to beat up on me all of the time,' or `how much I hated being tickled' or `fed squirrel,' or `hit,' or `yelled at,' or `listening to others yelling,' or `being forced to go to church,' or `not playing with my friends on Sunday,' or thousands of other things, which, in the final analysis, don't matter enough to be worried about. However, I know for a fact this is easier said than lived.

Andrea made several sideways comments this week about the piles of unsorted stuff I had left on the stairs, and the boxes in the bedroom. Since it is hard enough, in the start-up stage Dynamic Resource is at, without having clutter become a major issue, and since it rained all day on Saturday, I used the day to solve the problem before it became an issue. By 9:30 PM I had all of the boxes out of the bedroom. I ended up putting back in the bedroom a box of computer manuals, a box of backup tapes, a box with the Colorado County newspaper articles in, a big container with slides and photos in, a box of manuals to take to Ron Szabo in College Station, and two boxes of preprints from an article Roger Anderson and I did back in 1994 back in the room under the `Bat Table,' which Andrea can now use as a desk for her Young Women's stuff. It was a very hard job for me to do. The reason is it put me face to face with my failures. I threw out two copies of the 835 `Lovelets' I wrote for Marti. I recalled the weekend of February 29th, 1994, just seven years ago, and a trip to Cedar City following an earlier threat of divorce. I started writing my daily `Lovelet's' on this leap-year day (Uncle Dick's birthday). Years later I read Marti's journal entry for the same day, describing her feelings for one of her on-line friends. Emotional baggage! How do you deal with it? Do you stuff it, repress it, and let it come out in unheathly ways? Or do you discuss it openly, then forget it and get on with life. I feel it is important to be open with facts, and to get on with life. I will be interested in the comments I get back from all you all.

This week started perfectly on Sunday evening. Our Home Teachers, Brother Lunt and Brother Gebauer, had just arrived and we were chatting when we heard the back door open. We thought it had just blown open, then we heard Roice say `Hello' and Matt and Rachel jumped up, squealed with joy, and went running in to see him. It was neat. Brother Gebauer's lesson on prayer was wonderful. It was really nice to see Roice and talk to him for a while. He had been in Vidor for the day visiting Melanie and Jared. If there was any issue, it was with me being aloof, and I'm sure if this is the case, it is because of emotional baggage I seem to insist on carrying around with me, even if I don't want to and don't mean to.

Monday was set aside to finish my talk for the Corpus Christi SIPES. I had rented the computer for this talk and for the Continuum Technology Meeting #2 last Friday. I had not heard from John Chestnut since he asked me to talk, and so I called first thing to make sure I was still talking. He called back about 10:00 AM from a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico to tell me `Opps, I double booked.' I mentioned I had rented a computer for the talk, and he said he would reimburse me the cost. He pointed out he did not have an abstract for my talk, and then asked if I would talk the following month, on March 27th. I said sure, and the abstract is now at http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic/papers/bioabstract.txt. At noon there was another RC-SIG teleconference planning the meeting at Iowa State on May 9th-10th. It is going to be a good meeting, and Carolina Cruez-Niehra has prepared a nice web site describing the meeting at http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/RCSIG. I spent the afternoon and all day Tuesday finishing up the abstract, preparing the talk, and doing other things to keep me distracted from thinking about my emotional baggage. My friend Benson Ford, a Houston architect who's work I have followed for several years, came out about 2:30, and we went over to Maudeen Mark's place, where we discussed the project I have in mind for her property.

Wednesday was a great day. I left the house at 9:30 and set up the new bank account for Dynamic Resources at Chase Manhattan on Mason Road. I forgot the Chroma projector, which Andrea had picked up for me last week, and she brought it over to me after one of her visiting teacher stops. We exchaged the projector in the parking lot and I took off for lunch with three guys from EEX, while she went in to sign the signature card. The 11:30 lunch at Dennis' on Westheimer replaced going to the HGS meeting at Petroleum Club downtown Houston. My friend Marise Mikulis from PAIRS was there, having lunch with Eb Pye, who was our first VP of Marketing at Landmark Graphics. I gave and received two hugs, and we had a great conversation while I was waiting for Dave Henderson (who lives across from the pool), Mike Paget, and Ben Davis of EEX to arrive. EEX is interested in Dynamic putting up the money to bid on 7 blocks in the Federal lease sale the end of the month. Swede Nelson is interested in putting up or arranging for the money if the prospects look good. In addition, I got EEX to commit to bid on blocks for two of Dynamic's prospects if the investors are willing to put up the money for them. Marise started to come over to say good-bye after lunch, and she saw that I was giving a presentation on the portable PC, so she didn't. It was a release of emotional baggage just to see her again, and to recall the PAIRS meetings we shared. I left Dennis' feeling like everything is going to turn out great.

I got downtown about 1:30, for my 2:15 meeting with Dave Agarwal of II&T and John Howard of Aquila Energy. Aquila is a $350 million fund set up to provide financing for proven and potential undeveloped production. They are the financial arm of Utilcorp, a Kansas City power and electric company. It was an interesting meeting, and along with the discussion with Riley last Friday, it got me thinking about the importance of electric companies today. Ben, I guess I have finally realized what a good position you have placed yourself in. Is your company one of the companies coming into Houston with the deregulation of power? If so, maybe I should be talking to your company about funding Dynamic? It was disappointing that Aquila was not interested in funding Dynamic, because we are too much of an exploration company. Oh well! I was still pretty up about the day all the way back to the house in Houston rush hour traffic. One of the priests did not do his assignment and so we had no activity on Wednesday. Hopefully I can help him recover, so he will not feel like he is adding to the emotional baggage he carries around with him. I took the portable PC and Chroma's projector and gave the guys the new presentation I had put together on the obsolesence of maps. It went over pretty good, and then Christian Singfield called when I was about 2/3rds the way through. I gave the portable phone to one of the guys and he ended up talking to each of them for about 5 minutes from Brisbane, Australia. Interesting evening.

Thursday I tried to back up the presentation. I could not find an external read-write CD. It seemed I came to dead-end after dead-end. Because John Chestnut paid for rental of the PC I ended up buying a ZIP-250 drive for the PC upstairs, and backed the presentation up on 4 zip-drives. It took about 850 MB of disk space for the presentation. I couldn't get it to work and talked them into letting me have the lap top for an extra night. Met with Alf and Joe Watson at 2:30, and worked at Chroma from 3:45 to 5:45 learning how to bring up their software to look at Dave Agarwal's prospect offshore Matagorda, Texas. I stopped to see Rob on the way home, he was not there. Finished the back-ups when I got home. Sara, thanks for the post card from France. As you can see I have posted it, and if you click on the image at the left it brings up a larger version.

Friday Andrea took the PC back for me. I stayed home and talked to Riley from 7:10-7:40, who had driven down to Denver. Turns out he used to work for Ted Collins, who Ed Story had connected me to. Ted called me about 8:30 and we talked until 9:45. He is interested in what Dynamic is doing. He would be the ideal business partner. He worked for Pan American for three years and then stareted American Quasar, where Riley worked for him. He later started H&G, which became Enron. He lives and works in Midland. He is coming to Houston Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, and we will have dinner or spend some time talking. Hopefully this is the break we have been looking for to get all of this good ground work we have laid being used. I spent the day at Chroma and learned a lot about how their software works. It was a good day. I got back to Katy just in time to pick up the missionaries for dinner. Andrea had fixed a nice pork roast with all of the trimmings. When I took them back, I went by Rob's again, and again there was no one there. Roice had said Rob was going to come and visit him this weekend, and so I was suprised when Rachel said she went by and saw Rob on Saturday and that he was doing good. At least I know that much. I ended up watching `Ghosts' on TV after I got back home. The last time I watched this movie was . . . opps, emotional baggage.

Saturday morning started with Choir practice. We have some great songs we are singing for Easter. I particularly like the words and music to Orin Hatch's poem `Jesus' Love Is Like a River.' I've already described my day of moving and throwing out and refiling emotional baggage. It was midnight last night when I finished and I was definitely tired. We had a good Fast & Testimony meeting today. I particularly was touched by Sister Feil's testimony. Chris Schmidt and I had a parent's meeting on the High Adventure, which will be to Durango, Colorado early in June. I sure hope I can get Rob to go with me. However, I doubt if he will be willing to come unless he let's go of some of the emotional baggage he is carrying. Guess this is a lesson we all need to learn. We can't fly when we are tied to the ground by the gravity of past. I hope and pray you will each do better than I have done. It takes real men and real women get on with life and to throw out, or even put to the side, their emotional baggage. I hope you each do better than I have."

I'm interested in sharing weekly a "thoughtlet" (little statements of big thoughts which mean a lot to me) with you because I know how important the written word can be. I am concerned about how easy it is to drift and forget our roots and our potential among all of distractions of daily life. To download any of these thoughtlets go to http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets or e-mail me at rnelson@walden3d.com.

With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)

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Copyright © 2001 H. Roice Nelson, Jr.