I spoke with an anguished mother this morning, who told me “this isn’t fair, we are good people.” She was recounting a story about how her landlord had collected rent from her family illegally, as the house she is living in was foreclosed on. She has to move from her home today, with her disabled son and husband. She has never missed a single rent payment.
I thought about all of the conversations I have with people about positivity. Being personally positive sets up an expectation for positive results. Sometimes, things just don’t work out that way. It brings to mind a book that came out in the eighties titled “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”. At the time, I thought the author did a good job of explaining some of the vagaries in life. As with anything difficult, the point was to cope for the moment, to get through the moment so that one could go on.
I am an analyzer and I want a formula. To get back to positive thinking, I want positive thinking to be meaningful and to control what happens in my life. It does not. Positive thinking won’t stop a hurricane, it won’t keep me healthy and it won’t guarantee that I get to keep and use all of the money that I have worked hard for, for all of my life.
I attach meaning to the work I have done in my life. I want my past work to pay my way through my future. I think this is a reasonable social contract and I have done all of the things that the prescribed formula advised me to do: I got an education, I got a steady job, and I worked and worked and worked. I put money in the bank; I put money in the 401K.
All of our “choose-in” choices, by life design, are also “choose-out” choices. Money in the bank can’t be spent on a child’s new braces (until you take it out of the bank) and time spent at work, cannot be spent at leisure. I understand this concept completely. I have had to choose between emergent needs on many occasions in my life.
What I missed, what I did not comprehend, is that at some point, all of those choices do work out to something in your life. What I mean by this is that, if you are a person who has no competing interests in your life and that makes you able to put your money in the bank, then at some point you will probably have money in the bank. The price you pay is “no competing interests”. In other words, you have nothing to spend money on, no family, no partner and no children.
The reality of our material construct called life: is that, we have what we most focus on. If we focus on our children, it is likely that our children will be around for our entire life. As we have taught them to be concerned and to have compassion by giving those gifts to them, so they will also demonstrate those same gifts to us as we grow older.
Again, every “choose-in” has a corresponding “choose-out”. In other words, we pay a price for all that we decide is important to us, because we are also relegating other things to unimportance. When we choose to have children, we are also choosing a very large financial investment.
The unpredictability of life circumstance is that, no matter what choices we make, good, bad or indifferent, life can and does, intermittently, destroy it all. That’s the problem. That is the issue which terrorizes my analytical brain. It is as if life mockingly laughs at my need to draw lines and to keep accurate spreadsheets. Yes, yes, Mrs. Smith, we see that you are organized, but now you have been fired from your job and all of last week’s planning is for naught. Or yes, Mr. Smith, we see that you have saved money and paid for your house, but now your daughter is sick and you must take out mortgages to pay for medical care to keep her alive.
We know that justice is a social construct. We work hard to make justice real in our society. We work very hard to mitigate the whim of life by purchasing insurance and being safe. It matters that we take these precautions, yet it does not guarantee that life won’t happen. Bad things do happen to good people.
As to choosing in and choosing out; I always did the best that I possibly could in every moment. There are lots of things that I did not choose, good and bad. As to positivity, it is what brings me through the changes and unpredictability of life, and then forces me to take the next step.
