Perspective

Blame Otis for his turn of mind.

I was driving home last night, using the time (as I sometimes do) to catch up with friends (it's relatively dead time, I'm in the car, the only other thing to do would be to listen to the radio and either sing poorly or get my blood pressure up).  Through a happy chain of circumstance, it was Otis that I got to spend time with last night.

We went through our usual litany of discussion - children, wives, jobs, how things are going - until we arrived - perhaps inevitably - at my most recent postings.

"Job and life couldn't be going better, huh?"  he asked.

Which of course started the flood - which it is always seems to - of this and that, of things I've written about here, my general dissatisfaction with the state of so much of my life and my real sense that I am now essentially trapped in a rut that leads to my grave.

"So you're home life is going well?"

Sure.  Everyone has blended in here so darn well - which is true, no sarcasm added.  Probably the least happy person in the room is me - which is probably true in a whole lot of areas.

"Well, look at the bright side.  At least your home life is good even if your work life is not what you want.  Imagine if the two were reversed."

The car is still driving.  My mind has pulled to the side of the road in a cloud of dust, thinking.

What if the two were reversed?  What if I had the best job ever, but every other part of my life - which for me is almost totally my home life - was terrible, falling apart, in a constant state of war?  What would things be like then?

It's tempting to ask one of the silly questions, like "How much worse could it be?" or "Who would noticed?" After all, work is somewhere which takes up a great deal of many people's lives, myself include.  By the time commuting is done, almost half of my day is spent in, at, or traveling to or from work. 

But the question is not that simple. What if the two were reversed, if my work was a place where I felt that everything was going very well indeed and my home life, my personal life was an area of constant battles and dissatisfaction, of arguments and troubled children and antagonism?

To be honest, it's tough for me to imagine such a thing - simply because I've never had to deal with it.  Ever.

I can theorize, I suppose.  I don't enjoy yelling and arguments as I am now - I can only imagine that such things would be 10 times worse.  And the experience I've had at homes where there is tension - that simmering sort of anger that seems to permeate everything until all within are in sort of a stew of crisis, ready to boil over as soon as the "guest" leaves the premises - would be enough to poison all that one tried to do offline.

And Na Clann?  I can hardly imagine.  They are well adjusted at this point, doing well in school and other activities, loving of God.  To strip that away, to inflict an atmosphere of strife and the uncertainty of not knowing when the next explosion is going to go off or even if a parent will continue to be there....

Does all of this (at which I recoil in horror) somehow make the rest better?  I'd be lying if I said beyond a very real sense of alarm at that sort of scenario, not necessarily.  What ifs don't change the reality of what is.  The rest of my life doesn't magically get better merely by comparison.  There is still work to to be done, maybe still things I can do to choose that course...

But it is good -and I am grateful to Otis - for making me go through the exercise of perspective and realize that the two things are not equally bad. In one case, it is something to be borne.  In the other, it is something that will scar lives forever.