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It's hard to keep a positive attitude when you're faced with some monumental, horrible tragedy, like divorce or loss
of a job or being separated from your children for any length of time.....or all three of those things at once. I guess
one of the main reasons is because these things (family, marriage, job) are how we define ourselves, and what we do becomes
part of who we are.
I was in a situation like this not too long ago, and I don't know how many times I heard some well-meaning doofus
tell me, when I was out of work, that the perfect job for me was just around the corner, and keep your chin up and have a
positive attitude and blah blah blah. I know they were just trying to be helpful, and there was even a lot of truth to what
they were saying, but I wonder did it occur to any of them that what they were saying was just reinforcing this idea that
a man is really only ever worth as much as he brings home in his paycheck? No one says it, of course, and you don't consciously
think of it in those terms, but not a single person, not a single friend or clergy, tried to present this idea that, even
without a job, a dude still has a value and still has a purpose and can still contribute to some greater good. Family and
home and career are such huge things that loss of any one of them, individually, is big enough to throw the whole rest of
your life out of whack and take your focus off of other things that you should be focused on: And I'm not talking about cerebral
or spiritual pursuits, either. I'm talking about eating and sleeping.
In a divorce, you might focus on putting your best face forward so that the judges and lawyers and pschologists will
see what a good parent you are, and forget in the meantime to buy your son a birthday present and what time you should get
him to bed. You might focus on picking out the right suit for that job interview, and forget that the job sucks anyway and
that you don't even want it.
The hardest thing is that there's no time off when you're faced with crises like these, and it's easy to lose focus
because suddenly things that you took for granted are gone and you're scrambling trying to just hold on to whatever you have
left, and it becomes so all-important that you can hardly think of anything else. Much more important than they are to people
who've never lost them.
People like that are very fortunate but also very soft, having never faced hardship. Everything's always been easy for
them. They have money and women and fast cars, and while the rest of us might be tempted to just hate them, I've found it's
better to remind myself that the richies are the ones who are going to be caught completely unprepared when an asteroid hits
the earth, or the ice-caps melt or apes take over and civilization collapses and money is worthless and we're all scrounging
for food. All of this goes back to my theory that when civilization really does collapse, Amish people are going to take
over. Amish people just freak me out.
None of this, of course, is any help or comfort to the people I know who are facing unemployment or custody issues
or whatever. And I know a lot of them.
There's just something alien about not having a job or having to change careers late in life. It's like not knowing
who you are. When you meet someone new, the first thing you want to know is what they do for a living, and you make so many
assumptions about them based on that. Like, if you find out that someone is a doctor, you can pretty much assume that they're
smart, they're focused enough to have gotten through medical school and residencies and internships and whatever, that they
own a boat and they play golf.
Just a little off-topic, but I hate golf and the only thing more boring to me than hitting a little ball six miles
across a lawn into a little cup, is watching other people do it, or sit around talking about it. I should amend that
by saying that NASCAR seems equally boring.
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