Webster’s defines a prism as “a medium that distorts, slants or colors whatever is viewed through it.” Anyone who has ever held one knows that ordinary white light passed through a prism will break into the individual colors of the spectrum. Depending on how you hold it in the light, the color bands will be wide or narrow, fuzzy or distinct. At more acute angles to the source, the colors are crisper, more defined. But hold it obtusely and the lines of transitions become blurred.
Perspective is like the colors from a prism—the closer you are to a problem, the clearer and more narrow the lines of thought issuing towards the solution. But each step away makes it less defined; more subtle and open to interpretation. Or misinterpretation. Or freaking out.
There is no entry in Webster’s for “freaking out”, as much as our culture does it. We freak out about love (Does she want me?). About money (Is this enough?). About work (Am I good enough?). About the unknown. My definition of freaking out is the complete loss of rational thought about a single event based on a single, often skewed perspective. Whatever it’s about, it is usually groundless, almost always unwarranted and doesn’t make anything any better. Unless, of course, it helps you find perspective.
High handed as I may sound, I am not immune to the occasional bout of freak out. Lately, I’ve worried if I’m really good enough to do the things I’ve been entrusted to do, or if I’ll even make it far enough to prove that I am. Seems like the times when you least need a horror story about an experience you’re preparing to have, someone sends you theirs. Recently, I heard a story about someone else’s journey through the place I’m getting ready to go that made Freddy Kruger sound like the Easter Bunny. I took from this tale the knowledge that the totality of my dream rests on a knife’s edge and is beyond my control. Well, when the story was over, the freak out began. It seemed that the culmination of my career could be undone with the wrong word or a single failed test, and I slowly began losing it. I was in the process of unraveling to my newest friend when she quite forcefully said “Stop it.” Her tone was enough to give me pause, and she continued.
She told me a story of a friend of hers who had a dream not unlike mine with the same sort of conditional testing before he was allowed to begin. During this quest, she said, it was found that he had a serious medical problem for which the solution was life-changing surgery. Here I am convinced that the worst possible thing would be to not get my job, and this poor guy went for weeks wondering if he would even survive.
That’s where I got it, and the bent light was straight once again.
Our lives are driven, governed even, by a succession of triumphs and failures; the triumphs fleeting and the failures potentially devastating. As we move closer to the sources of our happiness, the lines between success and defeat become sharp as the knife on whose blade our illusions of that happiness rest. But, moving away, far enough away to see the big picture, we can appreciate the subtleties or our achievement enough to appreciate the degrees of accomplishment where true joy lives. Often, whatever is as bad as you can imagine in this moment was only the front door to someone else’s walk through hell, yet they survived, and so will you.
By the way, the guy—my unexpected source of perspective—did just fine. He’s gone on to live a wonderful life full of good friends and family. As was his desire, his destiny, and his life.
Too many times we distort our own light, trying to filter it too narrowly through skewed notions of what our happiness is. It is only when we step back and allow the lines between joy and despair to fade that in the spaces between we find where life is really lived.
A bittersweet week comes before me. I have three more days at work before I take about 10 days off in preparation for starting the new job. On the one hand, I’m so excited (and anxious) about the adventure I’m looking forward to, but I really do hate leaving where I am. It’s not fear of the unknown or some weird reverse of the “grass-is-greener” adage at all, but really…I’m just going to miss what I am doing and the people I work with. We’ve done so much good together in the past year that walking away now almost feels like leaving a story incomplete.
After the last goodbye on Wednesday, I’m headed to the beach for a few days to do nothing. At least, that’s my plan. Really looking forward to a little downtime before beginning the next chapter.
Do good things with the week to come, learn something new and be safe.
No comments:
Post a Comment