The Only Lesson - Softcover

McKenna, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1452535027 ISBN 13: 9781452535029

Publisher: BalboaPress, 2011

Synopsis

In this true story and journey of discovery, Bill McKenna shares a life of intense experiences. He earned his black belt, learned to fly planes and helicopters, ran marathons, 50 and 100-mile endurance races, survived a several hundred foot free-fall in a skydiving mishap, and saw his life's dream shipwrecked by an unseen island. The journey brought financial success and catastrophe, a constant struggle with crash-and-burn relationships and a battle with depression. Nothing in his life would compare to the intensity of what he was about to experience, all of it quite by accident, and as his sister said, to the unlikeliest of people.

About this title

About the Author

Bill McKenna brings a life of intense experiences to the writing of this, his first book. While earning his bachelor's degree from Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, he was awarded a black belt in a mixed martial art and started running a series of endurance races that culminated in the completion of the Western States one-hundred-mile run in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. While establishing a successful sales career, he continued pursuing various passions including skydiving, helicopter/airplane piloting, and yachting. More recently, he experienced a literal and figurative accident that inspired him to share his story. Raised in Chula Vista as the oldest boy in an Irish-Catholic family of twelve, he currently lives in Southern California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Only Lesson

By Bill McKenna

BALBOA PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Bill McKenna
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3502-9

Contents

Dedication.............................................................................viiForward................................................................................ixChapter 1: Youth.......................................................................1Chapter 2: Yacht.......................................................................7Chapter 3: Michelle....................................................................13Chapter 4: Aw Heck, I'll Do It: Learning to Forgive....................................19Chapter 5: Intuition: A Gift of Forgiving..............................................25Chapter 6: I'm So Drunk: More Gifts of Forgiving.......................................29Chapter 7: Fear and Love...............................................................35Chapter 8: A Tough Pill to Swallow.....................................................41Chapter 9: Stress, Love and Water: The Work of Doctor Masaru Emoto.....................47Chapter 10: Turn The Other Cheek.......................................................55Chapter 11: The Guy In The Gas Station.................................................59Chapter 12: Letting Go.................................................................63Chapter 13: Happiness Doesn't Fall From The Sky (or does it?)..........................67Chapter 14: You Are Love...............................................................73Chapter 15: Ego as Big as a House......................................................77Chapter 16: Why Is Everyone Being So Nice To Me?.......................................85Chapter 17: Uncaused Joy...............................................................89Chapter 18: Who Just Turned The Lights On?.............................................93Chapter 19: Now That The Lights Are On: Understanding Love.............................97Chapter 20: It's Simple................................................................101Chapter 21: Allow......................................................................105Chapter 22: Rearview Mirror............................................................109Chapter 23: A Shift in Perspective.....................................................111Chapter 24: The Lesson.................................................................115Summary................................................................................117Afterward: Do it Yourself..............................................................119Bibliography...........................................................................121

Chapter One

Youth

My earliest memories are very happy. I remember waking up in my bed, running down the hall, so excited to see my father and to jump into his bed for another bout of wrestling. We wrestle, play and laugh. It is so much fun. I am probably not yet two years old. Then I decide to bite him. Wow! That got a reaction. I received the first beating of my life. No more wrestling bouts. I thought I bit him on the leg, but reflecting on his reaction from the perspective of a "grown-ass man" to quote Oprah, I'm going to guess I took a bite out of his manhood.

I was born in the early Sixties to a second-generation Irish couple. My grandparents on both sides fled the hardships of Ireland for opportunities in America. They settled in New York City where my parents met and were married before they moved to Chula Vista, California. We lived a few miles from the Mexican border in the most southwest part of the United States. I was the third oldest of 12 children and the oldest boy in our strict Irish-Catholic family.

I recall being terribly angry as a child and this carried into my adulthood. I was prone to fits of rage. I had a terrible temper which I just could not control. I do remember a brief period at the very beginning of my life - my earliest happy memories of running down the hall to wrestle with my father. Then came the bite and its aftermath. Not long after that I walked in on my father beating up my mother. I was enraged and frightened. I stood in between them and screamed at him "don't hit my mom!" I was quickly ushered out and sent to my room. I can still recall how it felt.

"When I get bigger, I'm going to beat him up."

I desperately wanted him to die. I lived in fear of him and what might erupt at any moment. His anger was intense and unbridled. He disciplined through violence and the threat of it, coupled with techniques that seemed to come straight from the interrogation operation manuals of the CIA, KGB and Seal Team One. He would use a delightful combination of sleep deprivation, repetition, anger and threats sprinkled in with an assortment of well-timed and unexplained slaps, punches and choking. He walloped with belts or other handy tools of the trade at hand as he vacillated between being good cop/bad cop. These interrogation/ endurance sessions would go from days at a time stretching out to months in a few cases. They instilled a great amount of fear in me and that fear propelled me in many ways throughout my life. Fear manifested itself as generalized anger, hate, jealousy, judgement, violence, racism and assorted insecurities. On the flip side, I developed mental and physical endurance, focus as well as a high pain threshold.

I left home when I was 18, not a particularly big deal for me because I had been working since I could remember. My wife loves the story of my very first job. At three years old I would get on my tricycle and go knocking door to door asking, "You got any cookies?" I was pretty successful at it, going farther and farther until I was all the way around the corner on the other block. It was far enough away for people not to know who I belonged to, a long distance in those days. It's a wonder I was never harmed or worse. I always chalked that up to others instinctively knowing that "this one here is just too surly, I will certainly get bit in the process." I learned early in life that if you got out of the house before Dad got out of bed you had much better odds of not being the focus of a beating or an endurance session.

A child was born in our house every 18 months from the time I was five to 18 years old. Both my parents worked, so the older kids looked after the younger ones, cooked the meals and had, how shall I say it, "a liability exposure," for a beating should anything go wrong, as it often did. This was cause for concern and I was none too happy about the job. As you can imagine, there was also quite a bit of thrashing between the siblings, with lots of humor thrown in strangely enough.

Every kid in the house was "given" a song, usually about someone in their class that we perceived that they liked. All the kids would gang up and sing it to the targeted sibling of the moment/hour/day as they screamed and cried. This was inevitably followed by another family favorite song we made up called "feeling sorry for yourself," which was nothing more than those words melodically sung over and over. Somehow it gave us all great comfort, or at least those of us who were not the target of the moment.

I discovered an interest in martial arts from the age of eight. I desperately wanted to go to a local karate school but that was vetoed by parents who already considered me too violent. The last thing they needed was for me to become skilled at my propensity for opening up a can of whoop ass. The desire to learn martial arts was very strong. I convinced other students to teach me. I read books, learned about every pressure point I could and even organized lessons in the garage from other teachers before I was old enough to get a job and peddle to schools myself. I studied about 18 different styles earning a variety of color belts before getting my black belt at the age of 20.

Where we grew up and went to high school the whites were the overwhelming minority. My classmates were primarily Mexican, Filipino and Black. Chula Vista and Imperial Beach were essentially low income, border towns. Surrounded by other cultures, as a white, Irish-American kid I experienced what many minorities do. Having anger issues and a large chip on my shoulder sure did not make matters any better.

I reflected back the prejudices and violence that I experienced, becoming just as prejudiced. As a child, it was all I knew. I thought to myself "this is just how life is and everyone is going to either try to give you a beating or take something from you."

I adopted my own ways of dealing with life. At 14 I bought a bike and foul weather gear, which gave me the freedom to get a better job (cookie begging only takes you so far as you get older). The bike also equaled self-reliance. I didn't have to beg friends for rides every day to get back and forth to school which was about 20 miles away. Why so far away? I went to high school about two miles from the border, a private Catholic school. I was told "you are going there, and by the way you are paying for it too." Working late at night kept me off the "radar" and put cash in my pocket, which to me meant more independence. By the time I was 18 I had already put nearly 13,000 miles on my bike. I had a little odometer that I was so proud of.

I left the house at 18 for college. My college years were great. I felt in-the-moment and proud that I was accomplishing something. Yet I still felt a deep-seated anger. I had no idea what my anger was about but I knew it was there. I was enjoying that period of my life and having fun, but would often run into hostile people. I chalked this up to reality, reinforcing my early established beliefs.

I found conflict everywhere. I came to the conclusion that jerks were just omnipresent. I would swear on a stack of bibles that I was being discriminated against because there was no logical reason for people to treat me the way I was being treated. I did not say a word to anybody and yet they gave me the "stink eye." I was in the right and "they" were the jerks. I wanted every one of color or minorities to feel what this white guy was feeling, so they could see it was happening to everyone, or so I thought.

I avoided like the plague people who I perceived had done me wrong - lied, cheated, stole or just berated me with judgemental foul remarks. If you don't let anything go, that is quite the dance to do. It ends up being a pretty long list of people to avoid.

After getting my degree, I worked a regular job for the next 25-plus years. I was angry about the past and fearful of the future. I kind of felt like a jerk, did not like myself all that much other than the very brief moment when a goal was accomplished.

After college through my 20's, 30's and early 40's my life continued to be filled with what many would consider intense experiences. Shortly after earning my black belt, I started running endurance races, eventually completing the Western States 100, which as the name implies, is a 100 mile race along a trail in the Sierra Nevada mountains that goes from snow to 114 degrees. I became passionate about sky diving and performed many jumps, before almost dying on St. Patrick's Day when my chute collapsed hundreds of feet above the ground. I learned to fly airplanes and helicopters, eventually buying a few helicopters of my own. I bought and lived on a yacht in Mexico. I experienced both financial success, becoming a multi-millionaire, and financial catastrophe a few times over. I struggled through crash-and-burn relationships and struggled with depression. None of these life experiences compared to the intensity of what I was about to experience, all of it quite by accident, and as my sister said, to the unlikeliest of people.

Chapter Two

Yacht

I began dreaming of owning a yacht around the age of five. I fantasized that I would get one as large as a cruise ship for my birthday. I'm not sure what I would have done with a ship that size at that age but "a girls gotta have dreams" you know. Several years ago my dream came true when I purchased a yacht. Although not exactly cruise ship size, I loved it and enjoyed countless days and nights aboard.

During my first summer with the yacht I visited Avalon, the small harbor city on Catalina Island 26 miles across the sea from Southern California. Fast asleep one night while moored in the harbor, I had the most vivid dream of my life. I was aboard the yacht and at the helm in the pilot house on a pitch black night. Suddenly a huge rock cliff, part of an island, appeared on the left side of the boat. We hit the rock cliff. I was thrown forward into the helm and the entire vessel listed to the right. Shock and horror filled me. I heard scrapping and tearing as the rock tore into the left side of the boat. I woke from this dream in a sweat, my heart pounding because it all seemed so real. I was grateful it was not.

A year passed and I found myself traveling north up the coast of Mexico, headed to Catalina Island for some serious rest and relaxation. Aboard was a Mexican national serving as a deck hand named Miguel. Also on board was Richard, a wealthy retired guy from the USA whom I had met in Puerto Vallarta. Richard had spent a lot of time at sea and though I did not know him that well, I was happy to have his help on-board. I knew that I needed more than just Miguel and me for the trip north.

Richard was an investment banker who had done well for himself and retired early. Initially he seemed fine, with entertaining stories, but when he talked about his work as an investment banker I became a little uneasy. For example, when he found conflict he loved to sue. If he lost a case, he didn't take it well. He described hiring a private eye to dig up dirt about his legal adversary, uncovering an affair and sending pictures to the perpetrator's wife. There were more stories like that, and he seemed almost proud of his paybacks. My uneasiness wasn't helped by the small quarters of the ship, but I tried to steer the conversation to the positive stuff. My plan was to drop off the Miguel in Ensenada just before the U.S. border, stop in San Diego just long enough to refuel, get a new pair of running shoes, drop off Richard and then off to Catalina to recreate the best summer of my life. I was all about keeping things positive.

Just south of Ensenada I was at the helm while the others slept. I noticed three numbers that appear to me occasionally, usually as reassurance about accomplishing a goal. The number combination "308" was everywhere, appearing on all the different systems. I thought "that's cool, going to the island and the universe is saying way to go! Right on course!" I had never seen it displayed to me so much. At the same time, I began to have this very uneasy feeling that something was wrong. I attempted to scale down on the computerized radar screen and it locked up completely. I did not want to reboot the computer because I would then lose my other navigation system. The system showed us several miles from some small islands off coast, but I was concerned about other ships so I went to our second radar system and scaled that down. We looked good other than the very center of the display which usually has a little clutter. I was still uneasy. I tried to look outside but it was absolutely pitch black. I sat back down at the helm and then it happened ... a long scratching and crunching sound as a huge rock cliff appeared to my left. I was thrown forward into the helm as we rolled over to the right. I was not even sure if this was real because it was happening just as I dreamt it in every detail. I could hear Miguel in the forward bunk cussing up a storm in Spanish and somehow for just a flash his cussing struck me as hilarious. Terror and chaos ensued. The smell of wood and fiberglass filled my nose as I checked on the crew. Every one okay? Yes. I ran to the engine room. No water there, so I dogged down the hatch. The crew reported that we were taking on water in the forward. I had to move away from the island so a wave did not come and smash us to bits. It was still pitch black. I could not see what we hit or tell where we were. I zoomed in on the electronic map and navigated backwards on the same track that I crashed into the island on. A few minutes later we were back at open sea.

"Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the vessel Sea Hunt 20 miles south of Ensenada. We hit a rock and are taking on water."

Silence. Not the good kind. "Mayday, mayday mayday....." Finally, a scratchy and garbled reply comes back.

"This is the United States Coast Guard Station San Diego. Are you in immediate danger?"

"I think so, we are taking on water."

"Okay, we'll launch the helicopter."

I radioed back for the coast guard to stand down while I looked to see how bad it was. It's 11:45 pm. I went forward and it was torn up. We had water but were not sinking. I recalled an old movie about John F. Kennedy and his boat PT-109 during World War II. He had taken a hit below the water line and he throttled down to lift the front of the boat out of the water. If it worked for JFK, I decided to try it too. Miguel went forward to send back word how it was going. I throttled down and it actually forced a ton of water in. It was coming in very fast. Miguel was cussing again. I backed off the throttle. Even at that point my mind raced forward. Out of imminent danger, I didn't want to go through what I knew would happen next - insurance companies, shipyards, conflict over repairs. I knew it would take many months, perhaps over a year to repair and who knew if even then it would be right. I was deflated and depressed. I wanted to put my dream down, literally, on the bottom of the ocean floor. I could do it too, just by hitting the throttle. In minutes the ship would be on the bottom and we'd be safe in a coast guard helicopter or boat. I desperately wanted to do it but also knew that if I did it deliberately, Richard would eventually get me. So we limped into Ensenada, put a patch on and about a week later headed to a shipyard in San Diego to begin the long painful process of bringing the yacht back to her pre-wreck condition. It was just as painful as I thought it would be, filled with conflict of all kinds from all directions.

The next day, as I sat eating a street taco I had a strong feeling that the accident was for a reason, like being forced to stop so something could happen. I looked around and did not notice anything. Surely, the wreck didn't happen so I can enjoy a delicious taco, although I can't seem to get enough of them in my diet. Months passed as the repairs dragged on. A summer in a ship yard is not so fun. I continued to feel that same premonition but never saw anything that remotely looked like a good reason for a yacht wreck!

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Only Lessonby Bill McKenna Copyright © 2011 by Bill McKenna. Excerpted by permission of BALBOA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: BalboaPress
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1452535027
• ISBN 13: 9781452535029
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136