My little brother is facing layoffs, which is a big deal for a man with two kids and a house payment. Not as a big deal as it would be if his wife weren’t (very) gainfully employed and he wasn’t quite brilliant with his money (and just legit brilliant). However, it set me to thinking about loss and life and how lucky we can be in these things. Reality, you see, is a crapshoot. The odds of being born (according to motivational speaker, Mel Robbins–who quotes someone…) are 400 trillion to one. So we probably lucked out by being born. We likely lucked out more by being born into an opportunity of upward mobility. Think about how many chances we have to do something–anything–that feels special or significant in our lives. Watch zeros fly on to those odds. The point is this: We are lucky, but what are we doing with that fantastic opportunity?
My bro is training himself daily. He betters himself and stays ready for opportunities. I have, over the course of my career as an educator, continuously blown my opportunity to make more money. I sit at the bottom of a payscale that offers me a chance to make 15,000 more than I am making today, but I won’t take the 36 credits I need in order to do it. That is a miss. That money would be real handy if I was on the verge of losing my position. My mental health would be better with a nestegg of 15K x 19 years to make me feel safe going into the future. The point is this: We have an opportunity to better ourselves, but without being hungry we rarely take advantage of what is out there.
So I need to learn how to grow from these missed opportunities, and be a better role model to all my kids in doing so. I watch them miss opportunity everyday. I watch them waste away in front of screens and never even care that it is happening. That is no way to be.