Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
The president of Botswana, the African nation where the stone was unearthed by miners, showed off the fist-sized diamond – which at 2,492 carats weighs about a pound – at a viewing ceremony this week.
Officials said it was too early to value the stone or decide how it would be sold. But sources close to Lucara, the Canadian mining company that found the diamond in its Karowe Mine, estimated it could be worth more than $40 million...
Here is the link for more about that.
Thanks to Norbert B. for that link.
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Yogi Berra, a beloved catcher for the Yankees who played with Mickey Mantle and other Hall of Famers during the mid-century golden years, was famous for his humorous folksy way with words. In fact, there is a web site listing fifty Berra quotes, many of which have the ponderable quality of a Zen koan. One I of those is, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." As a detectorist I think of finding a pronged eating utensil in the road but certainly realize that is not the intended meaning.
In life there are many forks in the road that determine the direction and path of your life. Some of those forks are obvious turning points and may quickly come to mind.
When I think back over my life, I'm reminded of several major forks in the road. It is easy to think of such life changing points as well-thought-out deliberate decisions and actions taken to change the direction of your life. For me it seemed that the timing and appearance of some of the bigger ones was too perfect to be accidental or random even though they seemed to appear from nowhere. It wasn't just my choice either. There was more to it than that.
Anyhow, one of those forks in the road in my life was the following. I had just finished defending my master's thesis and was walking down the hallway and, on my left, noticed a job listing on the bulletin board. At the bottom right-hand corner of the bulletin board was a job listing for an instructor of psychology position at a university back near my home. So I gave them a call, and in a few weeks was teaching at that college.
Baby boomers were going to college like never before and I had made it through my graduate degree quickly enough to join the job market when the demand for college instructors was hitting a new high, which allowed me to go directly from my master's program into my first college teaching position to teach students who were only a few grades behind me in school. The timing was one of those fortunate coincidences, if you believe in such things.
I never planned on going into teaching either. I never gave it a thought before that. But that is how it happened, and I ended up spending a lot of years in college teaching on and off before I retired. Unlike some people, I didn't pursue a planned career path. It just happened.
I didn't start out as a great teacher, for sure, but I grew a lot from going into something that didn't really fit my personality at the time, and it led to other things in the future.
Another fork that I think of (I'll skip others, including one very important one that drastically changed my career path again) was the one that brought me to the Treasure Coast.
After many intervening years of varied professional experiences, I applied for a high-level job in one of the top American companies headquartered in New York. I didn't hear anything from them for quite a while and was looking at a house on the Treasure Coast. I was living in South Florida at the time. So I didn't hear from the company for weeks and gave up on that job and decided to buy the house on the Treasure Coast. After closing on that house, I returned to my place in South Florida to discover a message asking if I wanted the job in New York. Having just bought the house on the Treasure Coast, I declined the New York offer. The timing was remarkable. I waited weeks and heard nothing. And then within a few hours of buying the house, was offered the New York job. It seemed like more than coincidence to me.
In my professional life, I was more like a leaf floating along a stream. I never doggedly pursued a planned career path, but I don't regret it. I wouldn't recommend it, but it worked out pretty well for me. I did things I never imagined I would and probably some things I wasn't designed for and wasn't very good at, but I grew from the varied challenges. Maybe I could have gone farther and accomplished more. I'll never know, but it was an interesting trip.
It isn't that I never put effort and discipline into any area of my life - oddly it was some of the bigger areas, like my professional life, that I left up to fate or whatever you might call it. I had faith that it would work out and didn't really concern myself with it much. When it came to personal challenges, I exercised uncommon levels of effort and discipline. I somehow always felt that the bigger things, as most people would judge, would take care of themselves, and, for me, it always seemed to.
Translating all of that to metal detecting, you can set some goals and doggedly pursue a particular treasure or treasures or you can let it take you wherever it will. When you take the second track, it seems more like the treasures present themselves. The right track is probably different for different people, but no matter which approach you take, take time to reflect on and appreciate the journey, and when you look back, I bet you'll see a whole string of forks in the road.
As Yogi said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Then thank the one that put it there.
For more Yogi quotes see Yogi Berra quotes: The 50 greatest sayings from Yankees legend (usatoday.com)
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No new storms brewing.
The high tides today will be unusually high. You might want to check that out.
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| Vero Pier Surf Forecast from Surfguru.com. |