- Not The Only One!
- Post # 59 29Dec 22
- “The Chicken or The Egg”
- Hey family , welcome and as usual thank you for dropping in. I know that as the new year hits, there will be millions of people all across the globe, that will be seeking a fresh start on the New Year . The truth of the matter is that many people will be making resolutions to partake in all kinds of new endeavors. I believe the usual New Years Resolutions, runs about seventeen days , and then we shrugge our shoulders, and resound ourselves that somehow we will be in a better position next year. ☺️☺️. I am by no means trying to slam or shame anyone, because change is hard. This is a little bonus, if you are indeed interested in making a change in your life. I will recommend a book, its a paperback and a easy read. The name of the book is “Two Degrees” and the author’s name is David Platt. The book talks about most successful changes in our lives are made in small increments, such in as two degrees at a time. The thought process is not to take such a big bite out of life, but smaller, more manageable and attainable goals, and to build on it from there. We have the usual goals of to eat better, to exercise, or exercise more. Some people want to save money. Some want to travel more and work less. And of course there is always the hopeful of wanting to put down some bad or harmful habit , be it smoking, putting down some addition, be it comfort eating late at night, some drug use, a porn addition, and here is an unusual one and that is to be less of a helicopter mom or dad, and that is really going to be a tuffy, especially if you are in a codependency relationship with you child. I may deal with codependency somewhere down the road, but not today. I want to talk a little bit about how we live our lives at the speed of light, and most of us, have more on our plates than we can handle. This post came to mind from a fairly recent trip to the Midwest to visit another one of my single friends. This person is a small business owner. They employ about a hundred people over a four state span. As you would suspect they are highly functioning in the business world and would love some carryover to their personal life. They have on numerous occasions posed the question are they single because they work so much or do they work so much because they are single, thus the chicken or the egg. They have been divorced for over a decade plus , and Just to complete the story, there are two adult children and several grandchildren. The high functioning professional life and the personal, not do much!,, is not a new dynamic and quite common these days. I mean on the surface it would truly suck to be dysfunctional on both fronts. I know for myself and many others that our employment offers us an escape from returning home to an empty nest. Yes, there was a time when we were desperately looking forward to an empty nest, but the assumption would be that there would be someone to come home to , with a reassuring hug, and perhaps a glass of wine and a quiet dinner. However that is not exactly what life is offering us at this particular point and time . I almost hate to be the one to point this out, but we all enjoy the occasional win. The point here is that for many of us in our careers and professional lives, we have success built upon more success. Often this comes in the form of promotions, more money, increased responsibilities and all kinds of upward mobility. I guess you could say that is our wheel house, we are confident, acquiring new tools, gaining experience and the all so important praise of a job well done. We gain a reputation in our field as someone who knows there stuff and has their professional crap together, job well done. When it comes to the personal front, it’s almost the complete opposite of that, its some place where we have not had a degree of proficiency, and I base that on the broken relationships in our lives. I know, some of you want to get cute and point to your relationship with your kids, coworkers, the other soccer moms, or the guys you smoke cigars with, and that is great. However the hardest of all relationships to maintain is the person who gets to see you day in and day out, the one who is acutely aware of all of your flaws, the one who knows that you need to clip your toenails more regularly ☺️☺️☺️. This is the arena that we haven’t found that same level of success as in our professional lives . The one area has been a constant continuum with increased positive mobility and the other not so much!. This is attested to by a divorce, perhaps more than one like myself and the ones who never marry don’t get a pass either with the occasional change in dance partners. The truth is these breaks in our romantic relationships leaves us just a little more unsure of our footing each time out, and a little jaded from time to time. Each time we start out with a new dance partner, we have a joyous expectation of success and at the same time a little reservation in the back of our mind as to when will the other shoe drop. It’s almost as if we are setting ourselves up for failure. We think that we can, but we can’t live in both arenas simultaneously. . Its like people who say that they are people of faith, yet they live in constant state of worry , the two can’t exist together in a genuine reality. This is further complicated by two very real hard core rock solid truths. One is that most of us are set in our ways to some extent and aren’t very willing to make real and hard changes, because let’s be honest, that’s just down right uncomfortable. ☺️. The other also impossible thing to escape is our baggage and that is extremely hard especially if you were hurt, abused, cheated on, or possibly just had all of your needs unmet and unfulfilled in the relationship. I mean I’m talking about some very real deep painful things here ,so why wouldn’t we want to spend more time in our cubical or office, or out in a field somewhere? The picture has been painted and it’s not a very pretty one , and I am keenly aware of how hard change can be, especially if it’s honest, sincere, and on some level transcend. Most of us in our late forties and up are fairly functional when it comes to health, finances and having flexibility about where to focus free time. Some of us are aware that we are becoming our parents and thinking, Oh God, please not that☺️☺️. If I can, I want to draw a picture for you and no, I have no idea where all of the art analogies are coming from. ☺️☺️. When I was younger, much younger I thought it was cool to smoke, it’s just what the cool kids did. I thought that I was cool and this would just add to my self proclaimed swagger. ☺️☺️. I truly tried, but something in my body saved me from that because I couldn’t run. Yes, I’m talking, physically running. Whether it was sports in school or later in the Army, just wouldn’t work for me, others did it, but just not for my body, and honestly I have no regrets there with that. Ok, so again it’s one of those, what’s the point moments. Well, when I was self proclaimed cool, later in life pulling one of those little oxygen tanks behind me, that would be one of the furthest things in the world away from being cool. Ok, so let’s connect a few more dots, I want to say have some foresight, we all decline as we get older, no exception to that. If you are on a dating site and whether you are aggressively or passively in search of a partner, then that means that you are aware that there is more to life than just being comfortable and hunkered down in your bunker. Many can state that life is great and the only thing that is missing is that special someone. See! , here lies the problem,, we have created for ourselves some sort of utopia and we want someone to come along who will fit perfectly into our world, when the world is made up of imperfect people. Hear my heart here, I am by no means and never would encourage anyone one to “Settle “, but what I am saying is maybe we go over our list, you know the one I’m talking about, ” the must have ” , like we are shopping for a car or a home. We should be honest with ourselves and admit that we aren’t the catch that we once were ourselves , but our list says that we are. I think sometimes we jettison potential high quality matches for ourselves based on some blotch that someone has on their resume. First thing I want to say is that you should congratulation them on laying it out on the table in the open, because some people are really good at hiding things and yes sometimes it can be something that they may be unaware of or blind to such as commitment issues, but for the most part people are aware of their short comings. I said it before sometimes people want to split hairs over a person being married more than once and I get that, but you should have a conversation and see if they have learned something other than to never do it again ☺️☺️. A divorce is a divorce, and if you have only done it once that doesn’t make you superior to someone who has done it more than once, after all the goal is unto death, so you fail short as well. This next one is a little tricky and sticky and some of what I just said, applies here as well and that is for people who have a criminal record . Yes, exercise precaution but don’t totally disregard them because they made a mistake somewhere in their past. I said it may be worth a conversation to see if they learned something, have remorse, because obviously they have paid their debt to society. Sometimes bad people do bad things and sometimes people find themselves in places they never suspected to be. If you are wondering if I could cross that bridge, I can honestly say that I don’t know, but hopefully I would not totally disregard them based on a mistake that they made, as I said proceed with caution, who knows they may be a diamond in the rough. My point here is that we can be far to critical of others, while we expect someone to offer us grace. If we aren’t willing to make some concessions, we will forever be alone and again not settling, but being a little broader minded about what could possibly work for us. Remember you aren’t going to get perfect with imperfect people, you may come close to someone being perfect for you. When we get older and dragging that little oxygen tank behind us, it may be nice to have a partner to help you with that. I get that may not be your thing or reality, but how about someone to stand with you as you bury a parent or a tough health diagnosis, or a hundred other things that can blindside us in life. I don’t have a crystal ball, and this may sound crude, but I will try to soften it. You can have this wonderful person in your life, and possibly a husband or wife, but they are mostly great, you have a lot of fun together, laugh a lot, problem solve well together, but it can be one or two things that aren’t just perfect, remember imperfect people, and one of them is something you want sexually in the bedroom and it’s just not there. So you are unhappy, a personal problem, you can not put your personal happiness on your mate. So you go in search of this one or two things, do you not realize that you are throwing away the 80 to 90 percent for the lesser, the ten or fifteen percent? Who does that? Stupid people, yep everyday, come on, work it out . There is this thing called compromise, it’s incredible, give it a try. I’m, once again trying to paint the picture of life isn’t always perfect with a bow on it. Ideal can work and does work for many, remember you aren’t always a prize yourself, and wow, I snuck in another art analogy ☺️☺️☺️ . My dear, dear friend out in the Midwest who prompted this post, loves what she does for a living and it feeds her like peanut to an elephant. She knows that her long hours are taking a toll on her health as well on her mental psyche. I can’t tell you what the breaking point is, if nothing else I’m an extremely observant person and try to look at things from all sides. I give her bunches of kudos for always making time for family, especially her grandkids. While she makes time for family I know that she has deep anguish over not spending more time with her elderly mother and a substantial amount of guilt that it falls on her siblings, but she truly wants to be there, but unless she can be cloned or become omnipresent like God, then it’s just not going to happen, regardless of the best intentions. Making payroll and all of demands of running a company is enough to exhaust anyone. I can tell you that she is not a unicorn, but a unique pattern that is often duplicated many times over. I know that when I was much younger, my wife and I set down and weighed our options with child care verses her working and things are so much more expensive now. We talked about her wardrobe for the office, gas, wear and tear on vehicles in addition to child care and you make a decision based on the data on hand. What does that look like for my non- unicorn friend, well, we pay for someone to clean our house, someone for lawn maintenance and from time to time a part time chef. None of these things are bad or somehow horrible. I use to love to working on my personal vehicles, but with technology, that has become increasingly harder to do, but there is just something about having a personal awareness of your vehicles to make sure you aren’t being taken advantage of. And don’t even get me started about having an honest mechanic and how he or she is worth their weight in gold. I use to enjoy getting down there and changing my own oil, but now days I’m just happy to pay someone else to do it, part of getting older I guess ☺️☺️. One way to look at this is , that my friend runs a highly successful business and then she further contribute to some services jobs in her personal life as well, so she is great for the economy, but perhaps not so much, when it comes to her personal life . Ok, let’s wrap this up, if we can. I always want to be careful about making judgment calls, especially if you aren’t prepared to step into someone else’s shoes. I have no brilliant deduction for you on whether it was the chicken or the egg first, biblically speaking, it was the chicken, probably not what some of you wanted to hear, but as for my high powered Aries friend out in the Midwest, I can not make that call, and will not make that call. I think that she is an incredible person with a huge heart, much smarter than myself and some where, some how she has figured out how to put in fifteen and sixteen hour days on a regular, with all of the other devotions in life and still find time for a significant other. She is going to have to answer that question as to why she is single for herself, to me it seems obvious, but I’m not her and as I said , she is way smarter than myself. One last art analogy for the road I guess. When we draw a circle around ourselves and our individual lives, I believe that we all make choices every day about what is important to us and how we will interact with those choices. Some of us are highly functional about what we want to achieve in our careers. My challenge to you guys is to have that same zest for success in your personal relationships. Most of us have been up for a promotion at some point that we didn’t get ,or a job that we thought we could do better than the person who was currently occupying that chair. The point is, we didn’t let it stop us from our pursuit of next time was going to be the one. I hope that I didn’t say anything that you guys are choking on or having trouble swallowing. ☺️☺️☺️
- Till Next Time ✌️peace!
- Sandy The Southerner
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A veces es bueno leer y tener una idea de lo que opinan los demás, enhorabuena
i love that you are getting this all the way down in cuba