Best and the Worst

Over Thanksgiving weekend I didn’t know if I was going to get a ride to Rochester for dinner but was willing to concede defeat and spend the day by myself. I certainly wanted to go, believing it would be better if I could, but I was going to make the most of it either way.

Then out of nowhere three situations showed themselves that allowed me to not only get a ride on Thursday but also to go out on Wednesday night. I didn’t sweat it and things just fell into place.

Same thing for my friend Mike who found a ride from New York City to Lockport—Lockport!—with seeming ease. The two of us even talked about how easily things seem to fall into place just by expecting or allowing them to.

Now, today, with things up in the air there are certainly options that I hope to take more than others. Still, I found myself immediately drawn to concerns that the best case scenarios might not happen over the course of the next month or two and did it with a mindset that those were suddenly the only options that I have. And as it became apparent that the best case scenario was not absolutely certain to be there, for a good part of my day I dwelled upon that uncertainty and expanded it into an overwhelmingly discouraging fact that depressingly left no other possible desirable scenarios behind.

Whatever it is that makes the mind immediately dwell upon the worst situation I don’t know. That it seems so universal amongst people, where most would let the fact that the only thing worse than the job you have is actually looking for a job force them to keep one, suggests to me that it isn’t an inherent trait amongst us—nothing is that inherently universal—but instead seems to me to be an acquired state of mind that is passed around on a daily basis. But what do I know?

It certainly requires a strong concentration on my part to overcome immediate reactions such as these and have found myself even thinking of them now that I'm home.

But the very idea quitting a job is to have options. Great, so I don’t have an immediate source of income. Perhaps things won’t work out as perfectly as I can imagine them. The benefit of allowing yourself to have options is to have options. There is never only one. No need to worry about it. Because sometimes, like the best case scenario worked out on Thanksgiving, just by allowing yourself to be in the position to be able to take it, even the best case scenario does work out.