You Stay Here, I’ll Circle Back

My youngest son was on his first deer hunt where he could carry a gun, and do the shooting if one presented itself.

It did.

The deer was hit… but a bit forward.

We waited, and then started the tracking process.

At one point, not too far away, the trail petered out and I said, “You stay here, where I can see you. I’ll circle back to the last track and then walk around in a bigger circle to find the next track, and which way the deer went.”

I was so intent on teaching him tracking skills, it’s one of those things you read about, but until you do it enough times, it can be frustrating at first. You doubt yourself and your shooting ability; you question yourself on which way you saw the deer headed; and you get that sick feeling creeping in when you think you may have lost it.

As I was explaining the plan, he took two more steps forward and says, “Is that it, right there?”

Two more steps forward.

You could see just an ear, and a little bit of white fur of the belly, through the tall grass.

Just two more steps forward. And there it was.

I use the “circle back and check your back trail” principle a lot in life.

I learned it watching old cowboy movies and t.v. shows.

And I practiced it when I was a kid, being a part of the Gen-X club, I was running around wild in a large park near my home, and the CRP fields a farmer had just behind the few houses that were on the other side of our street.

I tracked all sorts of critters and kids in those places.

And once when I was checking my back trail, like Jeremiah Johnson looking for Paints-His-Shirt-Red, I spotted two older kids coming my way, I was about 10 or 11years old at the time.

So, I hid the pack of smokes that I had (that’s a bit of another story) and slipped away.

Ha Ha!! Success!

It’s a habit of mine.

More recently I circled back to check on an old goal of mine.

I needed to check on my name and how it comes up on the internet, for my website articles and especially my books.

Ha Ha! Success again! Top of the page with multiple listings there after.

What was my goal?

When I started writing there was another Dave Bosquez out there who would pop up on the top of the Google page.

And being a writer, a line from the 1986 movie Highlander came to mind,

“There can be only one.”

I was just starting to write and thought, “How does this work, how can I get to be top of page?”

My inner Lion said, “Bury him.”

How do I do that?

I “circled back” to my two, long dead, motivational writers, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, and reading what others wrote about them, and their writing careers, this is what stood out to me.

People described them as being “prolific”. They wrote… A LOT!

But they had whole careers behind them, newspaper articles, magazine short stories, and by the way… some books that are now, and were even then, considered “literary classics.”

So, I took two more steps.

I started a weekly deadline of articles, writing for 3 separate websites at one point, and started writing my books, and currently having lucky number 7 out and available on Amazon! (see the home page for The Joker now on Amazon!)

Recently I was able to take a few more steps, having asked for some help on producing a professional press release.

That in turn garnered a regional t.v. interview; a local radio spot; making the local paper; and conducting a book signing at one of the countries largest old car shows that had an attendance of 135,000 people!

That original trail started around 7 years ago now.

Now looking back, and trying Google, I fill the search page, with the “other Dave” waaaaaaaay waaay way down, on the search algorithm.

“There can be only one.”

Now, today, I can see the benefit, of the habit, of being prolific, in anything you choose to do. And it can be applied to any endeavor… like, health & exercise; hobbies like archery; and learning about more ways I can leverage my writing to move me forward in a bigger life goal that I have.

Being a bigger goal than just burying that other Dave, I don’t know him, heck he’s most likely a cousin spelling his last name the same as me, that was just a fun test to see if I could do it.

My most recent two steps forward, as I recover from a bad back. I updated my phone to have all of my social media sites at my fingertips; I have completed a Kindle version of The Joker; with the audio book not far behind; and have started the research phase of starting a YouTube Channel to focus my Emerging Man experiences and writings into a video format… just not sure how I want to format said videos ere go the research into it.

If you want a change in your health and exercise life; if you want to start a hobby; if you want to travel; if you want to write a book; if you want to start a side hustle or that small business you have always dreamed of… start now!

Take the next two steps toward it!

Be prolific in your thinking about it!

INUNDATE your negative inner voice with so much positive information that as far as voices in your head go, your inner critic realizes that, “There can be only one!”

And that one… is you… knowing when to circle back to take just two more steps forward!

The Emerging Man…

writing to ENCOURAGE, EQUIP & ENGAGE by “Offering Positivity with Work Gloves!”