Bumps In The Road

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

-- John Lennon, "Beautiful Boy"

Life is never static. The events of one's life are always changing and shifting, up, down, or around. There are those unbelievable moments in life when all pistons are firing just right and every aspect of your life seems to be coming together in synchronicity and moving in the right direction: upwards and ownwards. Your career is going amazingly well, you got the promotion you wanted, the accolades from colleagues and clients are free-flowing, you're well-respected, and you're kicking serious ass on every project that is assigned to you. "More work? Sure, bring it on, fucker. I can handle it." And you do, every single time.

Love life? Smashing success. You and your S.O. are happy, laughing, clicking, planning things well into the future, and thinking Very Serious Thoughts about each other. Things are never perfect (not in this world, baby), but they are very good, as good as they can be, as good as you could ever expect from another person who knows you for all of your flaws, bad moods, habits, quirks, and foibles, and STILL wants your sorry ass around. You love being around each other, and you see the potential for growth and a future together. You're optimistic that things are going to work out in the way that you want. For the moment, you're not focusing on the failed relationships that lie in your wake, like rusted old cars on the shoulder of life's highway. That was a long time ago and has nothing to do with now. With her.

Family? For a change, mom and dad aren't bitching at each other (or at you) and have settled into this too-tired-to-fight-now-that-we're-older status quo, a wary detente between two hostile, battle-hardened warriors, much like the U.S. and the Soviet Union circa 1987. "We can work it out. Let's bury the hatchet and be friends." Things finally seem good between them. For the first time in years, they are engaging in free trade and import and export levels seem to have stabilized. Your siblings too, are happy in their relationships and their respective lives. No complaints there either.

THE FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT, I GOTTA WEAR SHADES!!

Of course, as life is wont to do when things are going just a little too fucking well for your own good, the good times eventually end, the challenges come, and things start to get bumpy. Real bumpy.

For some inexplicable reason, the events of your life can start to go negative on you before you even know what is happening. The promotion you have been striving for, sacrificing for, killing yourself for, for over a decade, goes to someone else. You're not given the sign of faith, competence, and respect you feel you deserved from your peers. And it's not even about the extra few bucks that would have come your way. It's about respect and commitment. The disappointment you feel is palpable, and it doesn't go away overnight. You wonder how you can even stay where you are, how you can tolerate going to work every day with the very same people who made the decision that is holding you back. With the same people who were pushed ahead of you, on a very political, unlevel, and idiosyncratic playing field.

Over time, you suck it up, gather your dignity, take stock of your life and the things that really matter, and you get past it. You know your own value, even if they don't. And maybe it was time for you to get a reality check that you've been working way too much anyway, for too long, and there is much more to life than catching a flourescent tan in your office every night. You start to see that this goal of yours is really a bit of a mirage. That the disappointment and humiliation you feel is really about your own ego and wounded pride. It means zero in the grand scheme of things. You need to keep it in perspective, my brother.

Of course, your superiors' current lack of enthusiasm for elevating you to a more powerful, more lucrative, position certainly does NOT mean that they are now reluctant to keep deluging you with work. No, no, no. That's not how it works. It's actually quite the opposite. You get MORE work. They know (or think) that now you're even more hungry for advancement, that you're going to work extra hard to finally grab that elusive brass ring. And so, even more work comes your way. Just when you really need it. Just when you're really in the mood to be a good soldier.

Before long, the work piles up to absurd levels, and as always, you are beholden to several masters. None of them give a flying fuck about how much the other one needs you, or which work needs to take priority. That's up to you to figure out. All they care about is their OWN work, and whether it is being addressed to their satisfaction. They are eating what they kill, and you had better please them all, or suffer the professional consequences.

Because you find it hard to shake the identity of the good soldier and you derive perverse satisfaction at trying to succeed in impossible situations, you do everything you can to keep all of the plates that they throw at you in the air. For awhile, you manage pretty well. For a month, two, three, four. You watch others leave the office early, while you toil away, proud to still be a "go to" guy, even as others cruise by and turn down, or avoid taking, more work. You pat yourself on the back. "I am managing an impossible situation again. I don't know how, but I am doing it. Fuck all of you."

All of a sudden, you reach out to grab one of the plates you have been juggling, but you just barely miss it, and it hits the ground with a resounding, piercing crash. A new sound for you. Hmmmm. A bad result comes in on something you worked on that thought you had nailed. Not really a fault issue, just a bad result, but it sucks all the same, and you feel responsible. You deal with it.

Until another plate falls to the floor with the same cacophonic noise of ceramic hitting concrete. You now see that you have your limits. You look at the shards of plate collecting at your feet, and you wonder just how bad this is going to get, and what the inevitable fallout is going to be. The trouble snowballs, and now another dish crashes to the floor. This isn't good. Now you're the kid with his finger in the dike, trying to keep it together, trying to save the town. You're watching the rivulets of water seep through the brick wall, and you wonder how long it will hold out before the whole thing crashes down on you.

"And you may ask yourself - well, how did I get here?"

The stress spikes, and you start questioning your choices, not necessarily the career you chose, but the smaller decisions that led you to into your current predicament. Precisely how did my career get stalled? Stuck? You look at the personal sacrifices you have made for your job, and you wonder whether it was remotely worth the cost.

As this lovely bit of work-related drama is occurring, and your stress level is hitting its absolute zenith, the wheels start coming off your Love Train too. The timing is always impeccable in these things. The high sheen gloss of your relationship fades for reasons you don't totally understand, and your analytical and critical nature take over. You start to question things in your relationship that have been nagging you from the back burner for a long time. You start questioning the things you want. The person you're with. The plans you made. And it works both ways. Your S.O. is doing the same with you. She's looking at other possibilities, for the first time. Not good.

When these negative thoughts begin to prevail in your mind, your worst insecurities and anxieties kick in, and your faith in your partner, and hers in you, is shaken. You take the skeletons out for a walk, and suddenly, you feel as if you just took a big swig of sour milk that expired a week ago. The baggage you both have been carrying around with limited success since the inception of your relationship spills out onto the floor for you both to see in all its naked glory. It's scary, and it puts your relationship into turmoil. Only past experience keeps you from being shocked that things could go to shit so quickly. But keeping it real now is better than doing it after a marriage and two kids. This is what you tell yourself. You resolve to work it out, but neither of you have any idea of what the future holds.

On the family front, you knew it was too good to last. Mom and dad are bitching at each other again, over stupid shit they should be able to figure out. This is something you've been listening to since you have had ears on your head and an ability to understand words, and your patience for their bullshit and disrespect for each other left the building a long, long time ago. Your days of playing Mr. Mediator for them are over. "Shit or get off the pot," you say. If your roles were reversed, you would spank them both with a wooden spoon, which is what they deserve.

And if this weren't enough, all of a sudden, things on the sibling front are not kosher either. A marriage you thought was rock solid, turns out not to be. Three little lives you care about hang in the balance, and you worry about them very much. On top of everything else.

Only a healthy sense of humor and appreciation of the irony of life can help you hold your sanity together during shitty times like this. What karmic clusterfuck did I commit in a prior life to cause this mess? Tell me whom I wronged, and I will visit their current incarnation, anywhere in the world, and give them their fucking payback. I'll write them a check. Or maybe I will let them take a swing at me (hopefully this person is a now a female and a lightweight. Maybe a petite Japanese woman or Filipina). Let's make things right again!

While you are wallowing in self-pity, a few moments of clarity occasionally shine through your dreary melancholia, like illuminating rays of sunlight through dark rainclouds, to help you keep things in perspective, even if temporarily. You see someone struggling to get onto a subway in a wheelchair. You see stories of kids with cancer, who will never grow old enough to have these kinds of problems. You see people dying of disease, poverty, or random violence in Darfur, or Iraq, or Indonesia, or Palestine. These people aren't too worried about their careers or love lives. They're worried about surviving. Their next meal. Not getting shot or blown up. Your problems, as painful and valid to you as they are, pale by comparison. Unlike these poor souls, you have a safe place to sleep, a place to work and have an income, and food to eat. Unlike them, you know that you will get through the current insanity of your life. Deep down, you know, that just as the good times eventually end, the chaotic events of the past year will not last forever. And because of them, you will learn something new about yourself. In fact, it's these moments in life that teach you the most, not those happy days of carefree, unbridled joy. (Have I actually ever had any of those??).

When this run of trouble is over, you will eventually pick up the pieces, make new and better decisions, and end up where you were intended to be. Not necessarily where you THOUGHT you would be. Because, while you were busy making plans for your life, life was busy making other plans for you.