Uncertain Future
I haven’t written anything since before the election results. I think the things that are on my mind today coincide greatly with the election but this post is not politically motivated.
Kim and I have been doing really well with the weight loss. I think she is around 127 and I am just about to cross over into the 220’s. I can’t even believe how close I am to my goal. It’s really insane to me how fast and relatively painless this process has been, but I doubt it could have happened for me at another time. This is the only time in my life that I had all of the tools required to accomplish this goal.
When you have things relatively good, change seems impossible. Even if you know in your heart that the change is necessary and essential for your own well-being. Change is completely terrifying to people, even the one’s who claim to want it so badly. Several of my friends, in different fields, are not happy with their current state of employment, they have dreams, aspirations, and hopes beyond the world that they have worked in for years. More importantly, they have a deep-seated disgust for the job they currently hold, but the thought of getting a new job, of participating in that unknown element of change is even more terrifying. Sure, they hate their jobs but they know what to expect. They know, every morning when they wake up, what they can expect from one day to the next. It’s miserable but its comforting. There’s no surprises.
During a short political discussion amongst Kim’s aunts and uncles one evening, one of Kim’s eldest aunts looked me in the face and said “Barack Obama wants to change things, but change is bad.”
Her argument wasn’t based on Obama’s proposed policies or any perceived weakness in his campaign. It was, pure and simple, “Change is bad.” That was her point. This is a woman who came to a foreign country when she was young to seek out a better life than the one she had in the Philippines. She married an American doctor and still lives a very prosperous life despite his passing. She is the American dream and change brought that about.
I sometimes think about Kim’s parents and how unbelievably gutsy it was for them to come to the US, especially her father who’s family was extremely poor. He took a gamble and left everything he knew to come to this country, and now he looks back on it and says to me that if he hadn’t done it he’d probably “be in a grave somewhere.”
In the first few years of my life, my mother raised me in a condition that was was mimicking the unrest and chaos of her own childhood. Rather than live with an alcoholic husband like her mother did, and let me grow up in that environment as she did, she packed up– not even everything we owned, we left a lot behind– and we started over in Virginia. My mother’s diabetes was a wreck in those days, she’d be in a grave too if we hadn’t left.
My weight loss is insignificant to these things but there is a lot in my life I would change if I could. Losing 30 pounds has proved to be an enabling feat. Many other changes are occurring around me that I have very little control over, (you have to be cryptic when you talk about these kinds of matters), but bad, work-related things are going on around me and for some reason they seem even more insignificant to me than they might have 6 months ago. Like so many Americans, I may lose my job in the next year, but the only fear I have is fiscally related. I am preparing for the worst, but I am not sure I am even hoping for the best if hoping for the best means that nothing changes and I continue to feel helpless about the future.
Change sometimes feels like a fate worse than politely dying but often its the only thing we have that will keep us from doing so.
I don’t believe people voted in record numbers in the last election because of their race or their age or their buying into some kind of perceived sense of Hope. I think they voted because they were scared to death that another decade of feeling jaded about American politics was about to happen and they just couldn’t bear the thought of it. To be a little skeptical and still vote for Hope is so much better than to just hide in the basement somewhere. I can’t say with certainty that the new administration will deliver prosperity but I believe that rampant apathy would have surely destroyed this country.
I, for one, am tired of being scared of change. I welcome it as it comes. For better or worse. I am 7 pounds away from losing 40 pounds. I can do anything.
Good post, really insightful. I had a similar dumbed down version of this thought with Tanya, but that conversation centered around why we tend to delay taking Tylenol during the time we actually have a headache.