Places, everyone!

 

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón

It shouldn’t be a bad thing to see a need that you can fill and move forward to help. Or become friends with a coworker who seems to see the world through the same glasses you carry around in your pocket.

Should it?

This lesson keeps offering to teach me a few things that might be useful . But I continually slam the door in its face…..quite a few times, as it turns out.

 I’m a slow learner. And not a very good student, it seems.

But, this time, I think I’ve got it. And it wasn’t easy getting that door pried open—finally—long enough to stick my head in and say, “Come on it! I have finally seen the light!”

Here’s the deal: I’ll become acquainted with someone who moves into my world for a specific reason, and over time I learn much about them, problems and all. Keep in mind that by definition a writer is a nosy busybody who will suck every detail of your life out of you given half a chance. It’s what we do; what can I say? I’ll find out every secret you have and then I WILL put you in a piece of writing (without your name, of course; I do have some sense) for the entire world to see.

And then I’ll make my fatal mistake. I try to fix a problem for these nice people, friendly soul that I am. The boundaries between us in our original framework become blurred, or, if I’m honest, I wipe those lines out completely, as surely as dirt can be swept bare with a straw broom. Suddenly, we don’t know who we are in relation to each other anymore. Things get all mucked up and confusion reigns. The sad part is that the result often is a loss of the original relationship, the one that I relished so much from the beginning.

It all comes from a good place, but it never seems to end that way. (Which is probably why companies have rules about workplace relationships. But this is a story for another day...believe me.)

I think I have finally learned to keep people in their roles. My auto mechanic needs to be kept at the garage where he belongs, even though I found out that he has a child that needs some (free) tutoring. After all, I was a teacher in another life. It feels like a natural thing to do; help when I can. But if something goes south, I lose a tutoring job AND a good mechanic.

Aging gracefully—or at least without kicking and screaming the entire way—means giving up those impulses that got us into so much trouble in our younger version. For some, like me, it takes a bit longer.

But it doesn’t have to for you, those of you young enough to be thinking, “That will never happen to ME.”

Yes. It will.