No matter how bad things get, I assure you that someone else’s problems are far greater*.
Last night, SpyDad and I caught a movie called “The Pursuit of Happyness” starring Will Smith. It’s the story of a man trying to do the right thing for his family and career whose decisions land him the role of a modern day Job. The entire movie had my stomach in knots. You want to reach into the screen and help him when he loses one thing after another. Somehow he finds a way to keep living, moving, breathing, dreaming.
I’ll admit that I felt hopeless during my first layoff that lasted four months and even times during my last layoff which lasted two months to the day. However I never felt that I was in danger of losing everything, my nice house and cars perhaps, but never the essentials of food, shelter, and clothing. I remember once when my mom was cleaning out some old records, she found a checkbook my parents used while my brother and I were still little kids. My brother looked through her transaction register and laughed, “Mom! You only had $13 in your checking account in January!” She laughed a little while we roared, but now I know how difficult it must have been for my mother and father to try to make it on next to nothing as a waitress and construction worker. It really wasn’t funny at all. I wish she would have told us so.
I’ve been thinking of the answer to the meaning of life since I was a teenager. Surely, there must be a simple answer to explain it all. As I watched my grandmother dying in her hospital bed of lung cancer when I was only fifteen, I thought I knew the answer. We counted her breaths per minute on a regular basis, and I watched her struggle some days and flourish on others. It came to me in her hospital room. The meaning of life was the will to live. She was fighting to live. She wanted so much to spend more time here on Earth. She wasn’t ready to pass on.
A lot of time has passed since that day, and I’m not so sure that the meaning of life is the will to live anymore. I dreamt about the Happyness movie last night, and I thought of all the themes running rampant in the movie. One thing stuck with me over and over: sacrifice. Will Smith’s character sacrificed everything to live a dream. Today’s youth has no idea what it’s like to sacrifice something, myself included. We give and give and give, hoping that giving them something we never had will make it better. But it won’t. Children expect things now instead of dreaming or hoping or earning. We are depriving them of what it means to sacrifice.
You may view that as a good thing. Lack of want could be the new right of passage. Maybe in the back of our minds we think that giving our children the latest iPod, cell phone, or Nintendo will somehow give them that extra foothold into the ranks of the upper class. They’ll have opportunities beyond their wildest dreams! Okay, so maybe that’s a stretch, but you still want your children to have the most opportunity available. However, I think that experience and a willingness to work for what you want has a lot to do with the opportunities provided to you. When you sacrifice something to reach that goal, the victory is all the more sweeter.
That’s another reason why I believe the crowd in the movie theatre clapped when the credits rolled.
*Loosely adapted from an Albert Einstein quote.
