Try to realize it’s all within yourself no one else can make you change, and to see you’re only very small and life flows on within you and without you.
George Harrison
All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust.
Ecclesiastes 3:20
We went to church on Wednesday night – it was Ash Wednesday. This is not one of my more favorite church services of the year, because its intention is to remind us that we are mortal and that while God has breathed the breath of life into us, this mortal life will inevitably come to an end. Well geez I know that but I don’t see the upsides of dwelling on it. Well maybe there is this. Maybe I can take from this that as agitated as I can sometimes get about things, it will all work out as it should. Chilllax!
We moved to a new house when Rebecca our youngest was about seven or eight. In all the hub-bub of moving things get lost. One of the things that was lost was the “bill-book”. The bill book had thirty-one pages in it, one page for each of the bills that were due on each day of the month. When the bills came in the mail, I would insert them in the book and pay them when due. Of course, without the book I had no idea of who we owed money to, how much we owed and when it was due. Being the anally-retentive person that I am this drove me crazy. I stormed through the house ripping open boxes, throwing things in the air and raging about where in the world the bill-book could be. After days of this I resorted to offering a bounty for its location to everyone in the house. As we heard Macbeth say in Ms. Holland’s twelfth grade English class – I strutted and fretted my hour on the stage – all to no avail – the bill book remained missing.
One night as we tucked Rebecca into bed, she looked at me with those big innocent eyes with genuine concern and said “Dad, what are we going to do if we can’t find the bill book?” My wife Janice gave me a withering glance and I melted. This poor little girl was worried sick about this problem whose scope she thought was really threatening our welfare. I got down on the floor beside her bed and said “Becky, don’t you worry about a thing. We will find the bill book and even if we don’t, we are going to be just fine.”
How much unnecessary angst and stress do we place on ourselves and others, especially those that we love? My good friend Judy Tschumper once had to remind me that our employees often took on my mood, if I was downcast, they were too. If I was upbeat, they were too. Of course, we all have problems, and they are sometimes serious problems. We need to work at them as diligently as we can, to do everything that we can to overcome them. And then we need to let it go. Letting go can be so difficult because we never know WHEN we have pushed enough and when we need to stop pushing.
Many years ago, my family started a business. We all invested our sweat and our blood and our fortunes in this endeavor. We worked so hard and so long, sometimes for twenty to thirty hours in a row without rest. We had so much riding on it. But it was not to be. With each set-back we looked at each other in despair and wondered if this would be the end. Was now the time to cut our losses? Along the way we had a fire at the facility we were trying to build. We were all able to escape but it was a significant setback in time and money. I called my Dad who was one of our major investors to tell him the bad news. He said that he and my Mom would come over for dinner and we would talk about it. When he came in the door, knowing how much money he was going to lose I said, “Dad, this must be the lowest point of your life, isn’t it?” He looked at me incredulously, laughed and said – “One night your Mom and I were sleeping in the car, in the middle of the night, in the street outside of the University of Minnesota Hospital where your brother had just been admitted because he had polio – THAT was the lowest point in my life. This is nothing, nobody got hurt – it will all work out”.
A few months later at the end of an eighteen-hour day at about 9:00 PM on a summer night, as I drove from our parking lot the sun caught the intersection street sign at just the right angle and its message GLARED at me – STOP!!!! I stopped and something inside of me said – it’s OKAY to stop, you NEED to stop, the more you persist the more you are going to hurt the ones you love. We stopped. And then we started – started to figure out how to pay off our debt, how to start again, how to start living a new life. The denouement of that failed effort is a painful memory for me and my family. We lost everything – our savings, our homes and our reputations in a small town. We had debts that took me more than a decade to pay off. We had to pick up our little girls and move to another community to find work. We sold everything we could to pay our debts down. And in the end, we took the last small amounts of cash – about $500 – and kept it in a metal box in the trunk of our car because our creditors were levying on our bank accounts. I was thirty-five years old, with three kids and a wife without a penny to our names.
So where is the good news in all of this? The good news was that I was thirty-five years old with three beautiful kids and a beautiful wife. And we started over and little by little we got on our feet again. That was almost forty years ago. Sometimes it still hurts but so much good has happened since then – some bad too. But life flows on within and without you – it all worked out.
Well said, Craig