Who is Dave the Explorer?

A few years ago, I found myself really struggling at work. For the first time in my career, I was failing. Over the years, there had been times when I had not performed as well as I should, but for the first time, I was actually failing at work and eventually, I did. This was quite a blow to my pride. My supervisor was very patient with me and did everything that she could to enable me to succeed. I did learn and I did improve, but it wasn’t enough.

The main problem was anxiety. The more I struggled, the more anxious I became. The more anxious I became, the more I struggled. The more I struggled, the more anxious I became…. you get the idea. It was a spiral that I was unable to escape. Part of the problem was that I was fifty years old and was only then figuring out that I had been dealing with anxiety my entire life.

In job interviews over the years, I was frequently asked some variation of the question: “What is your greatest weakness?” I had been to enough job interviews to be prepared for this question. I always answered “Sometimes, I can have a problem with stress”, and leave it at that. Up to that time, I had always been able to structure my career and my life to avoid that stress and get by. Now, at fifty, I was unable to avoid it. During the process of failing and getting fired, I discovered that my “problem with stress” had a name: “anxiety”.

Learning that fact and beginning the process of dealing with it was of such great value to me that I was truly thankful for the experience – even though I failed. So, I have no regrets. And even now I believe that knowing what I know now, I would sign up for the experience again to gain the benefits that resulted from it.

During the middle of all this mess, my co-worker Quincy Smith watched me in these struggles and said something that has stuck with me. He said: “David, you just need to figure out who you are.” My immediate thought was “What?”, but I gave that statement some thought. Then it came to me with absolute clarity; I am The Explorer.

The title “Explorer” explained so much about me. When I was eight, my grandpa gave me a book on Lewis and Clark, which I read over and over. I loved to study the maps that came with National Geographic. Whenever I went to a new place, I had to break away and walk the neighborhoods nearby to see what I could see. I have always loved learning, just for the sake of learning. I have always been The Explorer.

So, this website is going to be the place where Dave the Explorer reports all the things that he has learned. To start, there will be a lot of information about the Enneagram because that has been the most important tool for my self-discovery in the last few years. There will be a section on the development of what I like to call Christianity 2.0. I was raised as an evangelical, but unlike many of my new friends, my deconstruction has been a gradual thing that has slowly evolved over time, as I replaced old ideas with new ones over the years. I will have a lot to say about mental and physical health, Spiral Dynamics, physics, history, politics (just a bit as it intersects other topics) and much, much more.

Why did I build this website? As I was embarking on this voyage of self-discovery, I asked myself: “What is the point of being an explorer, if you never come back to tell people what you saw?”