For those of you coming in at this part of the story, you can read:
https://samstabbed.blogspot.com/2019/03/gustavo-perez-turns-six-today.html
and then read earlier entries (starting at the beginning) at your discretion.
So I've managed to last seven years beyond my due date so far. And these seven years my life has been very different. It occurs to me that I've not really mentioned one of the main ways in how the attack has impacted my life. I think I've mentioned that when I returned to the park the following week just a few days after being released from the hospital, one of the regulars for dinner appointed himself my personal bodyguard; for the next few months, he was never more than five feet away from me the entire time I was at the park. Even when we talked, he never made eye contact because he was always scanning the area directly behind me.
The fact is that I found myself unable to ignore the kind of statement those actions said to me, that in the (then) relatively short time I'd invested into helping the homeless I'd managed to make a difference, enough so to inspire that kind of loyalty. As a matter of fact, this person who I will refer to as Bob was at the park this last Tuesday. He'd gotten a job driving a truck and had been on the road for a number of years but made a choice to quit driving, and try and find work in LA so he could help out on Tuesdays. So one of my main volunteers now is actually someone who used to come for dinner himself.
To make a long story short, if not for the attack, I probably would have eventually stopped. Instead, the attack turned out to be the catalyst for my choosing to make helping the homeless my vocation. That choice has come at a cost; I've resigned myself to part time work/hours (making less an hour than I did 30 years ago when I first moved to LA to work for Kaiser, actually) to cover my expenses as I work towards getting funding for my non-profit. My circumstances during this time have helped me gain a deeper understanding of what it's like to be homeless. But it's a choice I would make again; I'm much more content with my life now than when I was making six figures a year with a three bedroom home and a rental property. I'm not sure that I can explain it properly.
I was successful at my career in IT mainly because I've always been able to see the big picture; knowing how making a change in one place would cascade into changes up and down stream, etc. I guess the best analogy I can think of now is one put forth by C.S. Lewis. I'll have to paraphrase since I can't recall exactly where he wrote it. Essentially, Lewis proposed that the more of the world one explored, the smaller the individual he became, while the more one invested into his immediate neighborhood, the larger the individual became. But part of what ties into it is also about simplification, which is a difficult thing to achieve when technology places the entire world at one's fingertips, or where one merely has to pose a question out loud, and your cell phone provides an answer.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that the more sophisticated/worldly one strives to be, the more it is about themselves, while the more one invests in the relative tedium of the moment, the more it becomes about everyone else. Does that make sense?
