When I was a student at Santa Barbara, I had a professor who taught one of the last pre-requisite classes to get into the Business Economics major. As a result, he was constantly inundated with students on the borderline in terms of minimum grade requirements begging to have their grade raised.
Frustrated at all the students pleading with him year after year with story after story, he decided to make a statement in front of our class of 250 students.
“I was coming home from a long day of work in which everything had gone wrong. I was pissed off, in a bad mood, stressed out after missing the latest deadline, and exhausted after all the long hours. To make matters worse, I am stuck in deadlock traffic and going nowhere. As I glance around, I notice a UPS driver pulled up alongside me. He has his music playing, singing along with a smile on his face. His upbeat mannerisms are a stark contract to the scowl imprinted on my face. His only worry is that a package may get delayed or damaged, whereas I have the lawyers, bankers, and company management pushing the weight of the world onto my shoulders.
The point is, not everyone is meant for the business world. If you cannot score high enough on these exams, than maybe this just is not the profession for you, maybe you should consider becoming a UPS driver. It is probably a better life you would lead.”
At the time, I remember being horrified about how cruel he was to the students who so desperately wanted to get into the major but were just so bluntly told they were not smart enough to get in.
Of course now I realize, that there really is no such thing as being smart or not (well, maybe not so black and white). We are simply better at some things and not so great at others…you should have heard the laughter of the kids in Costa Rica at my pathetic attempt to draw stick picture figures playing sports when teaching them English.
And now, I also finally understand what my professor meant. To be honest, the UPS driver probably does have a better life. But the irony is that if it is so much better, then why didn’t he become a UPS driver, or why don’t we all???
It is that thing inside of you that drives you, pushes you as hard as you can until you can go no more. Not everyone has it, and it is not always a good thing.
Sometimes I wish I were the UPS driver, or better yet, the type of girl who just goes out and finds herself a nice rich man to take care of her (nothing wrong with that ladies!), but I am not.
I am sitting on my bed, surrounded by clothes, boxes, bags, and just random junk. People are coming tomorrow to take all my bedroom furniture, bookshelves, and cabinets. I will be sleeping the next week on my couch until someone takes that too, and then it is the floor. I need to be out of my apartment September 28 and have a one-way ticket from Zürich to London on September 29. But delays in my visa may cause me to get stuck in Switzerland for some extra time homeless. It is impossible to know how quickly the process will go. I am once again reducing all of my possessions to a few suitcases trying so hard not to look back.
Living life so up in the air, not knowing what is going to happen, trying to get everything organized all on your own (which Switzerland makes about 1000x more difficult) is exhausting, frustrating, and well, just plain difficult. But this is all self-inflicted. I chose to live my life like this. And sometimes I wish and think to myself, why can’t I be that UPS driver? But at the end of the day, (Keith you would be so proud that statement), you have to accept who you are and go with it. I have, and here I go again…
1 comment:
Amen to that!
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