A Sense of Purpose and Optimism is a Requirement for Getting Through It All
After a few months of that workplace getting to know you time, he texted me out of the blue on a Tuesday night.
“You home?”
“Yup.”
“I’m coming up. What apartment?”
“704”
Minutes later, the knock on the door and, aside from my family, the first person in Wichita was suddenly privy to my inner sanctum. I invited him in and asked him if he wanted a glass of whiskey. His eyes smiled.
JC was that guy in the office who kept things running. A long history in the music business and specifically the terrestrial radio aspect of it, he was meticulous, intelligent, focused, and had been running the five top stations in town for twelve years. Only three years older than I, his hair was thin and white and his face lined with a much harder experience than I had lived. While, at fifty-seven, I could still pass for someone in his late forties, JC was sporting the look and behavior of someone ten years beyond his age.
“You doing alright?” He looked, more than tired, he looked weary.
“Oh, I’m fine,” he lied with that thing where his mouth was smiling but his eyes were looking off a thousand yards or so.
He sipped his whiskey and sighed. “That’s good stuff. Whoa. So this is the bachelor pad, eh? Not bad.”
I laughed. “I’m not so sure it counts as a bachelor pad. That sounds sort of like I bring women up here or let my boss use it to bang Shirley MacLaine.”
“The Apartment. Nice.”
After a beat (and a second glass of booze), he relaxed and started to share.
He related how disappointed he was in the direction the radio stations had been going for the past three or four years. That it used to make him angry but lately he felt resigned to the dull, uninspired drone of the work. His mantra for the past few years under the Sales Manager made General Manager and the third corporation to buy the stations was to comply. This approach left his health at risk, the constant stress of watching this place into which he had put so much of himself slowly erode into irrelevance. As the place became obsolete, so he felt he had slipped a few pegs. He felt old and used up.
Soon the conversation shifted to swapping war stories of ‘the good ol days’ when he felt he was at the top of his game and my random approach to anything resembling a career.
“My contract is up in February. I don’t know if I’m going to renew. If I don’t I have no clue what I’ll do next.”
“Dude, once you’re out from under the thumb of all this disappointment you’ll find your way. A second or third wind, some freedom from the grind, you’ll bounce back in no time at all.”
“How do you do it? I mean, you’ve reinvented yourself so many times I can’t keep count.”
“Beats me. My life has been a perpetual motion machine. A friend once told me that I’m either at 150 miles per hour or sitting completely still. No in between.”
“Sure, but you’re almost sixty. How do you maintain that when the world moves past guys like us?”
“I suppose I’ve learned to care less about what the world thinks of me and more about the things I want to accomplish in the short term. I know that I’ll keep rocking until my heart stops and that all the invisibility that comes with aging isn’t going to stop that.”
“Where does that come from?”
“What?”
“That, I don’t know, almost naive belief in yourself?”
“Beats me. The over confidence of a mediocre man?”
“Lots of ways to describe you but mediocre ain’t it.”
“Back atcha, twice. We’re just in one of the later chapters in the book of ourselves.”
✶
To successfully navigate life, one must get comfortable with loss. The loss of stuff. The loss of people. The loss of security. The loss of vitality. We start with very little and we die with very little. What one cannot survive without is both a sense of purpose and unwavering optimism. We are at one of those cyclical moments in history when so many are struggling with a lack of one, the other, or both.
If there is anything we can absorb from the pandemic is how little control we have of the events in the world, how little influence our individual actions affect the larger narrative, how fucking small a footprint each of us leaves behind. By the time we realize this, we’ve grown old enough to be ignored by the rest of the gang so, like Cassandra, we are doomed to know the outcome but helpless to change it.
✶
Ronnie is angry a lot of the time. I met him at a small gallery in the back of a larger gallery in Wichita. His friend was a black artist who was displaying photographs of masks. I walked in because in the predominantly white crowd looking at watercolors of fish, a stream of black faces were going directly from the entrance, past the fish, and upstairs so I followed. I was the only non-black face in the room. Ronnie approached like he was going to bounce me. We talked a bit and agreed to meet up for a drink later.
A 2020 activist, he was a factory worker here until the corporation closed up shop and moved to a more business-friendly state. He’s been mostly out of work since but his son was ignited into Black Lives Matter and he needed something to latch onto so he joined the cause.
“You write books?”
“I do. Published two just last year.”
“I’m writing a book about my life. You think you could give me some tips?”
“Sure. It’s a memoir then?”
“Nah. It’s a book about my life. You know, being black in Kansas and all of that. I was in a wrong crowd when I was a shorty but I found Jesus and it turned me around. Then I started to notice how church people were liars and I left that. Too many white people, right?”
“Maybe you were going to the wrong church?”
“Nah. All churches here are filled with white people who lie right to your face.”
He seems stuck and I don’t know what to say to jostle him out of it—due in no small part the lack of melanin in my skin. He is all sense of purpose—having joined at least three local organizations created to combat racism in town—with no hope that the work he’s devoted to will have any effect. It feels like a bitter existence, to devote oneself to a cause without a belief that the work will accomplish anything.
✶
There have only been a few moments in my own life when I found myself lacking in either purpose or optimism. Those periods stand out as they are the exception rather than the rule. Just after my first divorce. No sense of direction and no vision of any sort of future. That lasted about a month. Just after my second divorce. That lasted a bit longer. After this last, most absurd marital failure, I lost it all and hard. I didn’t want to die but I really didn’t if I lived. I’m now back to full strength and my optimism is even stronger than when I met her.
It takes 33 pounds of pressure and five minutes to strangle the life out of a grown human. It takes far less to strangle their aspirations of meaning and even less to simply boot-grind the breath out of their dreams for more than trading life for money for security. It takes a death or a divorce or the loss of a job or status. It takes a massive humbling to scorch the earth of a point of personal navigation and hope for some sort of optimal future. Whatever the weight, both are precariously balanced between nihilism and cynicism, a gentle nod in the wrong direction and we’re all just a choice away from suicide or homicide.
✶
Lynda is all smiles, flowery hippie clothes, and jokes. She is that person who lights up a room when she strides in. She seems happy and hopeful and maybe is the latter but her role as her mother’s sole caregiver expired with her mother. She now has no goals as she spent so much of herself taking care of a dying woman.
“Maybe I’ll go back to school.”
“I should travel.”
“Should I get a job at the mall?”
“I was going to walk my dog but I couldn’t decide which shoes to wear…”
She is aimless. Full of optimism but no specific end.
When Lynda is alone, she weeps in the dark. A lot.
✶
A sense of purpose. A reason to wake up in the morning, put on pants, and push forth.
Undimming optimism that what you do in that day wearing pants will matter in even the smallest of ways.
Without both, what is the point exactly?
