sethlarrabee

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Last seen: 8 months ago

Seth is a man from Delray Beach, Florida, USA

My name is Seth Larrabee -- and I've been fortunate enough to have figured out that it's not the actual things that happen to us in our lives that makes the real difference in our circumstances, (the situations we find ourselves in on a regular basis), but what we do OR don't do AFTER what happens to us that makes the real difference in how satisfied we will be with our future lives...

Anyway, now on with the story! :-)

In the wonderful year of 1967, I was delivered to my mother-to-be, after 36 hours of agonizing labor, in St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Now I understand why she was always so mad at me, LOL!) But, I ended up only having to endure one sibling, a brother, 3 years my junior. He's alright...

So, there we were, my mother, my father, my brother and I living in what's known as the "Island Paradise". Then, in 1973, my father made a decision that would alter the course of our whole family's lives forever. I was only 6 years old when my father committed suicide. But, dam* it, to this day I can still remember it like it was yesterday!

Do you know those feelings I'm talking about? The ones a mother can only hope her most prized treasure on the planet...her child...should never have to feel. My mother has never remarried. And to this day, all these years later, I still don't feel she's ever been able to shed the stigma from that life-altering event...

I soon made it through all of it, as we have to, and seemed to just squeak by through the V.I. Montessori School on our little "Island Paradise" until I was twelve. In my 12th year in this confusing realm we live in, I went into 7th grade at Antilles School, which was a private school. Now, I'm going to give you a quick point of reference so you can relate to this situation. In the Virgin Islands, if one were of light complexion, you most likely did not want to be enrolled in a public school. No sh*t!

So, there I was, in Antilles School. Which, after the more regimented style of the Montessori system, was totally foreign to me. So, I had problems with the girls. I was "funny" to them. So, I basically jerked around, got into mischief and NEVER did any homework - for a whole year!

Then, in what must have been a last ditch attempt to try to turn a bright, hyperactive teenagers life around, I was sent to an all-boys boarding school in Barbados, West Indies, called Mapps College.

Well, that must have worked, because for the next three years, that confused little boy learned how to get along and get ahead. Let me tell you, it wasn't easy! But, if anything, the one lesson I was fortunate to learn at that stage in my life was this. Anything worth having has a cost. The greater the payoff the harder you have to work to get it!

When I was 24, I lived in New Orleans, Louisiana and landed my first sales position with a company selling frozen cases of Steak, Chicken and Seafood out of the back of a pick up truck. It wasn't very glamorous, but the money was good, and it forced me to literally leap out of my very well ingrained comfort zone.

One day, on my day off, I just happened to be at the office lending a hand in the warehouse.

And, that's when it happened!

The most wonderful woman I had ever laid eyes on walked in to my life. She just happened to stop by to pick up her girlfriend who worked in the office. Just to think, if ! hadn't been there that day, by total coincidence, I would have never met the woman I was to marry six months later...

We spent seven, mostly great, years together. Five of those were spent moving around the country trying to figure out where we belonged. We went from New Orleans, to Detroit, Michigan, on to Dallas, Texas...then to Tucson, Arizona. Then we pressed onward from Tucson to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, my wife's birthplace, to visit her parents.

Now, you have to understand, her parents had been begging us for four years to come and stay for a while. So, we had only planned to stay for about a month to visit and to try to gain perspective on our lives. Sometime during the third week of our stay, her father had a stroke and died in the hospital six weeks later.

Well, what started out as a one month visit ended up turning into six months, as we stayed to help my other Mom handle all of the affairs after my other Dads death. If we had only planned a two week visit, or if we had made the trip at a different time, we wouldn't have been there at that dire time. I remember both my wife and I thinking, there was a greater force at work drawing us there when it did.

Then, we moved to Florida from Vancouver in the Fall of 1997. We finally found where we both wanted to be! So we thought...But almost exactly on the two year anniversary of our move to Florida, divorce seemed imminent. Well, it became reality six months later.

You want to know what the strangest thing was?

We actually become closer AFTER the divorce than we had been for quite a wile before. We decided that even though we couldn't live together anymore we just couldn't justify throwing seven years together, some great some not so great, completely out the window.

Fast forward to today, and my life consists of doing my best to help as many other people in the world as I can learn how to do what they ABSOLUTELY LOVE to do. Not just what they HAVE to do!

Through all of my life's experiences, I've come to believe that we have never been given a better analogy about life's inevitable ups and downs than the one spoken by one of the worlds all-time great personalities. I'm sure you will all agree. "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get!"