Stay The Course

There are times in life when it becomes necessary for us to take the reins and steer. Far more common, though, are the times when it is necessary for us to realize that the reins aren’t ours for the taking, and should we take them anyway, will only steer ourselves off the road into a ditch.

I had a rough day (night?) at work. While stewing about the events that occurred throughout the day that I feel could’ve ended up in my favor had I just put my foot down, spoken up about and taken control of, I merged to get onto my usual exit off the parkway just behind another sedan. It was then that we encountered late-night construction where the two right lanes of the highway were coned off about a mile before the exit.

Anyone who lives in RVA knows, or should know, that summer is the season of perpetual construction. Everyone has to leave their house 30 minutes earlier than usual just to get somewhere on time because of the delays. Ironically, the infrastructure always remains sub-standard or worse at the end of it all. I digress.

The car ahead of me starts slowing down, way down, down to about 30mph in a 65mph zone (so annoying!). Then, the driver does something untoward. He (she?) swerves in between two of the cones blocking off the right lanes, picks up speed and travels in the coned-off construction zone to get to the exit ahead. Thinking to myself that they might know something I don’t, maybe that the exit is blocked or something, briefly consider following the example. Instead, I  simply continued on down the highway, figuring I’ll just use the next exit and turn around. At the time, it was 1:00am and I had nowhere to really be except safe in bed. After all, there were no signs saying that the exit was still open, like there usually are during highway construction.

We both picked up speed and travelled alongside one another for a few seconds, when I noticed him (her?) out of the corner of my eye suddenly slowing down. Just up ahead, right in front of the exit, the cones opened up to allow oncoming traffic from the left lane to merge, simultaneously blocking off the construction area, the same construction area that the other sedan was travelling in. I safely merged into the exit and off the highway as the other car was forced to come to a complete stop; the driver was now surrounded by cones and a construction barrier and could not get out.

There are so many things in life that we try to fight happening, so many messes we try to claw our way out of only to end up further sunk into the mud than when we started off. Our stubbornness, our impatience, our desire to be right about everything, our own egos get in the way. We end up hurting ourselves when we fight the powers that be. The moral of the story is: steady as she goes. God is in control. We can’t panic and veer off on our own course when we see trouble, or like in my case, when we don’t see the signs we want to see. The construction, no matter how cumbersome, is necessary. But, we can’t just stop, slow down, or blaze our own way through. We have to continue on through, knowing that we will get to the other side of it safely and unharmed.

This mantra washed over my brain as I saw the headlights of the other car becoming smaller and smaller in my rear view mirror. Every bad situation always has an exit, and I prayed that that person would find theirs safely, even though it was caused by their own folly (how many of us can relate to that?).

Trust the process. Stay the course

Better Days

I feel like the world’s biggest fool.

When I get upset, and my state of distress has lasted for a long time, it’s as if my problems are the only ones in the world. They all have been stewing and fermenting in my head until I just explode this bitter, foul vitriol that leaves  everything in my wake damaged. I turn into a child, stomping her feet and throwing a temper tantrum because she didn’t get sprinkles on her ice cream. And then, my sister has to come and help me vacuum up the pieces once the anger sharks in my head swim away. I’m working on this, I promise.

What are ‘Anger Sharks’, you ask?

Of course, I know that it’s only human to lose hope, and rant and whine and complain sometimes when times are hard and obstacles are the only thing we are able to see on the horizon. But, for some of us, depression can make life and all its intricate circumstances seem like the cloud that hangs over that one person while everyone else enjoys the sunny skies. Times are tough, and with our generation supposedly experiencing more stress in one month than our forebears dealt with in a 10-year span, there’s no wonder why we feel like the light at the end of the tunnel is really the headlamp of an on-coming train. Depending on one’s life and relationship choices and ability to judge character, having friends, family and significant others can either ease the strain or add to it. The things we do to our bodies both before and during times of turmoil can impact stress levels as well (speaking from experience, comfort eating, hitting the bottle harder and starting smoking again wrought havoc on my weight and made me feel sick. For a while, I couldn’t fit into my interview clothes). The choice that makes the most difference out of them all, however, can be the hardest for even the most positive, happy person to make: outlook.

The other night, I got up after tossing and turning for hours thinking about my dire situation. My unemployment is exhausted, I still owe about $650 for this month’s rent, my insurance got cancelled because of a data entry mistake that the Healthcare Marketplace made, and I’m still out of a job. What will I do? How can I pay my bills? Will I have to move? What will I do with my dog? If I have to go back to my mom’s, where will I put my stuff? It’s all second-hand, so I can’t sell it for anything. How will I afford gasoline to get to interviews? Why is no one hiring me when I’ve gotten jobs so easily before? Why is it that my background check with that one employer took a whole month before I was even able to start, but the guy that got hired after me got on board and started working in the same week? Why did I get let go from that other job over the employee who was always late, always left early, didn’t know what she was doing and constantly made the same mistakes over and over, was completely rude to her co-workers, was always on her phone or tablet during working hours, and would even put patients on hold to answer her cell? Why is it that my last boyfriend dumped me for wanting to lose weight, get healthier, and go deeper with my spirituality, for wanting to better myself? Why did I get bullied all through school when I minded my own business and left everyone else alone?

I got to thinking about what a horrible time I had in school with that last one. In middle school, I started having suicidal thoughts. I would purge my food, and collect things to hurt myself with. Luckily, I was in a school district with an open-door policy among their guidance counselors. Frequently, I would visit a counselor just to winge about how life was so hard (hilarious to me now what I thought back then was a ‘hard life’), and express feelings I wasn’t tough enough to snap back to the classmates who bullied me. One of my counselors told me the story of how her husband left her for a woman of another race he had been cheating on her with for several months (a very common and very hurtful experience within the black community) while she was pregnant, and even shortly before. She lost her home, her family wouldn’t contact her back when she tried to reach out to them because she chose him over them. Ultimately, she had to go into hospital one day and schedule a delivery for her son, who had already passed away while in utero. She lost everything dear to her in a matter of weeks. The reason I thought back to this was because this woman was one of the most cheerful and pleasant people I can ever remember meeting. Back then, even though religious education in public school was technically illegal, she would share her Christian faith, would explain to her students that faith was the only thing that kept her going when she felt like digging her own grave and giving up. Because she had no one to comfort her during her difficult time, she decided then to become a guidance counselor to help young people who need a sense of direction, or, like me, someone older and experienced with life to talk to and help put things into perspective.

The last I heard, that counselor remarried, bought a new home in a better part of town, and had twin girls. The jerk who dumped me gained all the pounds I lost. Some of the kids who picked on me can’t find work either, but some of them, unlike me,  have criminal records to contest with in the hiring process, and families to take care of. The company who took forever with my background check but not with the other guy’s came in about $9 million over their company budget for the second quarter, and maybe might have to start making  cuts soon.  My mother, who is also unemployed, bought me groceries and gasoline with her severance pay.

Is it too late to take back all those awful things I said? Is it too late to ask God to forgive me for being angry? Am I going to be punished even now for still not being sure about my faith or whether I want to be a Christian? Can I still love God and not assign myself a label just yet until I really figure it out? Now is the time I want to focus not on what has gone wrong (because SO much has gone wrong), but on what could have gone wrong, but didn’t, and on what I thought went wrong, but actually turned out to be right after all. I have no children, unless you count the four-legged, fur-laden, barking variety. I have no husband, and my mother and sister are both able-bodied. I’m not totally alone in the world, and no one depends on me to care for them. I have about $13,000 in student loan debt and $500 credit card debt, but I don’t have a car payment, so no one can come and take it away. Alfred (the car. Yes, I named my car) needs work, but he’s dependable and not too expensive on gas or repairs.  For now, I have food in my fridge, a roof over my head, clothing in my closet. Clothing that fits again! There’s soap and toilet paper and running water in my bathroom and lights and air conditioning and other things we take for granted until we don’t have them anymore. If the power goes out because I can’t pay, I have candles and a portable stove. Most of all, I have my health to be able to get out and work once I get a job. I have family and at least three or four good friends who won’t allow me to be homeless if I get kicked out. I will work again. I will smile again. I will get out of the desert and stop circling Mt. Sinai one day soon. Even the longest monsoons have to eventually end. Until the better days arrive, I’m just gonna have to learn to dance in the rain.

 

Lynette and Doreen: A Comparison

We all have days  in life that are less than pleasant, and days where we wonder why we even have to bother going on living. Some of us have these thoughts prompted by more pressing issues than others, while others suffer from ‘first-world problems syndrome’. Nevertheless, we all have experiences in our lives that make us more existential and world-weary than in normal circumstances. Sometimes, these unfortunate events are caused by other people, usually as a by-product of acts of selfishness.

In life, you’ll encounter two types of people:  we’ll call them ‘Doreens’ and ‘Lynettes’. Allow me to elaborate:

Doreen – she’s a fifty/sixty-something former sistah souljah, a pseudo-‘conscious’ airhead, probably with a superiority complex because she has dreads and – as is evinced by her accent, her abrupt manner and clipped communication (read: appalling lack of manners) – comes from somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line, but for whatever reason, has had to take up residence and employment behind the checkout counter at Kroger on the other side of it among us hicks and yokels. She is the typical WOC** of a certain age who is not wont to showing courtesy or simple respect to persons young enough to be a child of hers; thus, she will make you feel like a child in a bad way; her sharp tongue and questionable manners go further untempered with you than with those closer to her age. Yet, despite her air of “I’m better than you”, she is, for lack of a better phrase…basic.

She will do things to demoralize you, waste your time and drain your energy, such as refuse to acknowledge your greeting, have a comical lack of coordination, speed and customer service skills,  ask you for your shopper’s card twice, ask you where your cart is to put your $3 bag of onions in when not 45 seconds earlier you handed her your shopping handbasket and said ‘thank you’ when she took it. She will ignore the prompts on her register that follow when you enter in your debit card information on your end until you stare at her blankly, silently (and admittedly in a passive-agressive manner) indicating that it’s her turn. Finally, when she makes an error resulting in your banking institution locking your card, she will smirk and take the opportunity to be exponentially rude to you. When you politely ask her to return your eco-friendly shopping bag you never seem to remember to get out of the trunk for shopping trips but remembered today, her volume increases as she snaps at you to be patient even though you’ve literally neither said nor indicated anything in the neighborhood of ‘hurry up’.

 

Lynette – she’s a tall, cool, forty-something business professional, tired to the bone from the hamster wheel she endured that day at the office. She’s picking up a few items for the house while waiting on her daughter (Doreen’s co-worker) to get off work so they can ride home and fix dinner before heading out to bible study later this evening. She’s in line behind you and just wants to get along. She reminisces of a time, maybe back in her college days, where she had to make a dollar out of fifteen cents only to be told she  owed $1.05. She understands the best is never good enough. She will say things that seem simple, but have so much depth, like ‘I been where you’re at’, and ‘I’ve had a hard day, too, girl’ as she whips out her MasterCard and swipes before you get a second chance to object, making you want to start crying like a toddler who needs a nap, complete with ‘whine – dramatic pause-deep breath-wail’ startup sequence. Finally, when you’ve acquiesced and thanked her as profusely as is socially acceptable without looking stupid in public, she will give you – a complete stranger – a warm church-lady hug that makes you feel like a child in a good way.

 

It’s imperative and essential to the shaping of our concept of what humanity is to remember that each of us is, will be, and have at some point in our past been either a Doreen or a Lynette to someone else. The two types of people in your life don’t usually come with the express intent to make it better or worse. Yet, through a choice or series of choices, those people can encourage you or try your patience. How we react to them is a topic for another blog post!  If you’re like me, then you have had the good fortune to have God send you a Lynette at the exact moment a Doreen makes you want to whip out your pepper spray, thereby saving you from a free all-expense-taxpayer-paid trip to the Chesterfield County Police Department.

Maybe I’m a little bit in my feelings right now, but I discern a life lesson to be taken away from this experience. Doreen, through being selfish in her way (manifested through arrogant, inconsiderate, impolite behavior, self-righteous to the point of shifting blame for her own mistake onto her customer) made things worse for those around her. If I were the type of person to summon energy necessary to complain to management every time I were wronged, it may have been made worse for herself by causing her to be written up on her job. But, ironically, I’ve sort of been where she is. I’ve made mistakes on a customer service job in the past that I immediately regretted after, because they could have cost me my employment, my ‘face’,  and my credibility, but for the grace of God and someone overlooking it. I was about to just take my belongings and walk away fuming…but I would have been walking away from both a bad situation and a blessing.

Lynette, through her selflessness, helped further diffuse the bad situation by being the blessing. She didn’t have to shell out money for a girl in line in front of her who she didn’t know from Adam. She didn’t have to waste a single thought about my welfare. But she did. That simple loving act of buying some onions for a financially-challenged girl’s Struggle Life dinner was enough to restore my rapidly dwindling faith in God and in humanity at a time when I needed it the most. I’m almost not even upset about the fact that I have to call my bank tomorrow behind someone else’s screw-up.

I made it to my car in time for the floodgates to open and be shielded from public view. My cry-face is a thing of nightmares, folks. At first, my mind turned to how bad and embarraresd I felt, then to how I would have been scared (read: another form of selfishness) to have acted the same way if I were in Lynette’s shoes, lest I piss off the person I was trying to help, leading them to follow me into the parking lot to slash my tires and break my other windows (my car got vandalized in March; it’s a long story).  Then I think back to all the times I’ve ever passed up an opportunity to be a Lynette: not speaking out against the bullies in middle school when they left off of me to pick on some other, more nerdy, less defenseless kid; every time I’ve passed a disabled vehicle, then a pedestrian who was no doubt driving said disabled vehicle further up the road and didn’t stop to give them a lift; not offering to at least try and help translate for the struggling Spanish-speaking immigrant at the checkout counter at the post office. I resolve with new fervor to be a Lynette whenever I am blessed with the opportunity from now on. Paying it forward, if you will.

God Is An Expert Pilot

It never ceases to amaze and astound me how thorough God is, how completely he has everything in my life in the palm of His hands.

Last year, I took my first flight. Naturally, I was nervous, my legs were shaking as soon as the plane started taxiing (is that a word?).  To make matters worse, this flight came right on the heels of the flight out of Malaysia carrying 200 people that magically disappeared into the Indian Ocean. I think I said the Lord’s Prayer under my breath about 40 times before takeoff. I started to get that passenger anxiety kind of like when I’m traveling in a car in which the driver is going way too fast, and my right foot instinctively slams on the breaks. Yes… that, but multiplied by about 1,000. It was because I normally am in control when I travel (I’m usually driving), and suddenly I was traveling with no control to be had. The most frightening thing was that I could not see what was up ahead.

At some point shortly after takeoff, I said to myself, “This is your first flight, and you were lucky enough to get a seat by the window. LOOK!”  I realized something: I don’t know how to fly a plane. If I were to be thrust into the cockpit at that point, rest assured all of us would have been meeting our Creator sooner than expected. But the pilot knew, obviously, since I’m writing about this experience more than a year after the flight took place. The one who knew how to navigate what lay up ahead was the one who was in the cockpit, able to view it.
I realized something else: viewing what lay up ahead wouldn’t have mattered, because all of that would’ve just overwhelmed me…. but I also wouldn’t have been able to  just sit back and take in the magnificent intricacy of the highway interchanges one drives on each day,but never puts thought into how it was planned out from 10,000 feet above, or the beauty of the sun glistening off of fluffy, marshmallow-like clouds sitting like cotton candy boulders in the middle of the deep blue sea of the sky, or the horror of flying right alongside and over top of a dark, furious thunderstorm just outside the window, so close one could almost grab the thunderbolts with their hands… If I had spent so much time worrying about what lay up ahead on the horizon that I’d never be able to see, I would have missed all of that as we passed by at 200mph. There is no rear-view mirror on a plane, after all. Something also tells me that nobody aboard would’ve been too happy about asking to pull over or go back.

Such is life in Christ. I can’t see what’s on the horizon. Even if I could, would it make a difference? If I were in complete control of my flight, I’d be so overwhelmed with all the instrument panels, and radio communications from different towers, and burning enough fuel so that the plane is not too heavy to land, and storms to bypass, which ones to climb over and which ones to make a safe detour for, and which ones to fly through that I’d choke, crash and burn. I can control which plane I board, and to which destination, but that’s all. I can’t look back, either. All I can do is trust the Pilot. There really isn’t much of a choice but to sit back, enjoy a bag of peanuts, and take in the beautiful (sometimes terrible) view as it’s happening right then and enjoy the moment. At 200mph, it’ll be gone by before I know it, anyway.