I was talking to a “friend” recently who was telling me that the most miserable time of their life was when they got their degree. The near death experience that they had was not anywhere as harrowing because that was not in their control.
The various health disasters and hospitalizations were nothing compared to the feeling of being stuck. People that are filled with indecision are going to spend a lot of energy replaying the tapes of the past, they will recall conversations and try to pick them apart, they might start to blame others and feel resentful.
The friend eventually went to graduate school 7 years after getting the bachelor’s and quite frankly I am not convinced he is all that happy.
Happy people have their ups and downs…everybody knows that, we are all human.
But what about the people that are stuck in the past and constantly focus more on that than the present?
Here is how my “friendship” began and how it sort of changed my life.
A few years ago I visited a professor after class and turned in an assignment and I remarked that the paper was interesting to write. The topic was on a tribe in a rainforest that underwent gradual changes and altered many things about their social order based on a less than gentle anthropologist visiting and observing them. The intrusion into the tribe lasted quite awhile and it was amazing how they let him get away with it.
The professor myopically shook his head and mumbled, people are crazy and we are all doomed. He then went on to rant for 20 minutes about what is wrong with his job, his department and coworkers.
Something happened that day…I went home and I caught up on every assignment I had for the semester…the next day I started to do the same with the other classes that I had.
I visited that professor every month until I graduated and I was always struck by the effect it had on me.
Here was someone who was so negative and powerless that it had the opposite effect on me!
Years later I would still get emails and on occasion would stop by his office on campus to say hello.
He said I reminded him of me (are you kidding I am the polar opposite I thought to myself) because of my powerful memory and recall of events and dates.
He went on to say I should go to grad school because he would hate to see me waste my time with nothing but a meaningless piece of paper. He told me about all the jobs he had and how unfulfilled he was for the years after graduating. But, I asked myself, what about now?
He never had a girlfriend, never got married and didn’t seem to keep friends very long.
He is now 60 years old and insists he is the happiest person he knows and if it weren’t for grad school he would never have enjoyed such a lust for life!
I tell this story not to be sarcastic but to illustrate how one can create the bars of their own cage…always thinking something outside of oneself is the answer is not the key to happiness. Having the ability to recount over and over the unhappy times of the past is a sure way to stay mired in the quicksand of misery. Stuck on a feeling written by Ken Bownes
