Have you ever had an invitation to a cocktail party that changed your life?
5:30
Writer’s Note: Today in the United States we are celebrating both Washington’s or Lincoln’s lives with a holiday and since I neither have to go to my regular day job or take the kids to school, I am tackling a blogpost that has been brewing in my mind ever since before I started blogging last June (about 8 months ago).
This is going to be one incredible writing task, to take an epic occurrence in my life and reduce it to the equivalent to an online Cliff Notes without taking more than a few hours. Don’t know what I can do.
Have any of you ever met someone who was really at a rock star level of popularity? What if you are in your late 40’s, like I was, and had never met someone who was a major influencer? What if you could meet someone who embodied such a level of influence on political thought, who was controversial, who was well accomplished professionally, at the top of his game, and with an extraordinary history of academic and life accomplishments?
What if you were snapped out of life as usual and were taken, albeit for a brief episode in life, from being one of the multitude to be given the privilege of becoming a small private audience by the invitation of a man who is both adamantly loved by his audiences and vehemently hated by his critics in our twisted and turning world of political and cultural change?
You’d never forget that experience and it would somehow change your life, or at least begin to change your life and your attitudes in a way that you could not foresee.
Beautiful San Francisco, the City by the Bay. Image source: mcmanuslab.ucsf.edu
It was June 2011, it had been 4 years since I graduated from Chinese Medicine School and earned my Acupuncture License, travelled to China for a month to study in May 2008, then 5 months later, after the Recession hit, had taken an unintended and circuitous route back to full time engineering.
If you’ve been following my blog, you’d know that during this time I got involved in real estate property management and investing on the side and earlier in 2011, I had the unfortunate, though enlightening, argument with my employer at the time who boldly stated his belief to me saying, “You are no entrepreneur!” Well, that certainly wasn’t meant to be a pep talk ;).
I wanted to summarize this timeline to help you better understand where I was in my life when the following happened.
When June of 2011 came, my wife and I had almost completed remodeling our backyard and were working on leveling the concrete floor in our oversized shed/green house when I received a surprising email inviting me to a cocktail party being hosted by Michael Savage.
I could not believe it and had to send an email back asking something to the effect of “Are you serious?”
I was a pretty avid listener to Dr. Savage’s radio show and had contributed some money to his fund to help him fight the injustices he was struggling with. Coincidentally, since I live within 40 miles of San Francisco, I gather that Dr. Savage, out of his sense of gratitude, spontaneity and excitement with his yet to be released 1st novel Abuse of Power (still unveiled at the time), decided to host an “Independence Day Celebration” for some of his local supporters.
Let me tell you, I was excited, overwhelmed. Giddy. I wasn’t sure I knew what how to handle myself. Going to a celebratory cocktail party hosted by Michael Savage? Come on! I couldn’t even imagine writing something as unpredictable as this if it never occurred.
Not knowing exactly what “cocktail party” meant as the details were somewhat veiled before the actual event, I asked the “inviting emailer” (who I wasn’t sure was Savage himself or not) if I could bring my two young children. I wanted my wife to accompany me and she and I hadn’t practiced much going out without the kids.
The reply came “…YOU ARE WELCOME TO BRING YOUR CHILDREN.” So that settled it, I was able to take my family up to this cocktail party, invited within a week of the event, at a location somewhere in or near San Francisco, to meet and famous man I had never imagined meeting and to meet the others who would happen to be joining in.
Talk about the imagination just going wild! I’m not well connected nor any kind of socialite, so I was fairly ungrounded by this. What I was going to learn about myself over the next two weeks would cause an unexpected sea-change in my life that was yet another, out of my comfort zone precursor to my eventual in-ernst pursuit of personal development.
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Writer’s Note: It was 7:15, now 8:23, the kids are getting restless, so now that I’ve taken the plunge into this story, I will need to proceed with the next stage of this story tomorrow morning, but just as life often is, you can’t tell what is going to happen, you just have to live through the experience and ultimately determine how to reground yourself.
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If you’ve received some value from this story, please like, comment and share.
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I’ll see you… on the next page.
Challen Yee