By John Latta
Executive Editor
[email protected]
There are times that turn you, change you, and you feel yourself moving through them like a sailing ship, standing there watching yourself being shaped by the winds and the currents with a limited amount of input into what is happening.
We try so hard to shape ourselves, to determine what will happen to us, to choose our circumstances and to fight back against everything that gets in the way. But sometimes life brushes aside our efforts and moves us with winds and currents.
I remember as a young man reading John Lennon saying something like “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making plans for your life.” Not an original thought, but the idea struck me and stayed with me.
But it’s hard to live every moment unfettered by the needs of the day. That would be ideal, but our working lives get in the way. Paychecks do not respect outbursts of individuality, and rarely do the people that sign them.
But sometimes while we are wondering whether to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or take up arms against them, we find we have become new people. We see things a little differently. Some things are less important to us, and others have become more important. Things we once worried about we let come and go with a smile, and we find ourselves drawn to cases or causes that had previously left us unmoved. Our values have shifted as if an earthquake had moved them.
A driver may look out on a wet Monday morning highway and feel a calm he hasn’t felt in years. A driver may come home from three weeks out and find himself a better parent than when he left because the sons and daughters he felt uncomfortable or frustrated around now seem like friends he’s coming home to, still imperfect, but now it doesn’t matter. A driver waiting at scales may catch himself with a crystal-clear vision of a troubling relationship, aware of the core problem and it’s solution. A driver may one hot evening find himself making a major decision he had not known was in need of making and smiling in satisfaction because he has just discovered a clear road into the future.
