B-Movie Central Cheese Blog

For me, I think the three biggest difficulties in my life have always been related to three key elements – time, ambition and patience.

As far as ambition goes, I think my distinct lack of it relates back to my parents and how I grew up.  They always did their best to give me everything they could manage to give while I was growing up.  I never really learned to work for what I wanted, as it was generally always handed to me.  That’s not to say we were rich at all, because we weren’t.  We actually struggled a lot financially while I was growing up, which is something I feel really bad about today.  It became easy to just ask my parents for things and have them handed to me without working for them.  In the ignorance of my youth, I didn’t realize at the time how much of a hardship I was putting on them.  That sort of a realization only comes with maturity, and once that realization hits you, it’s something you feel bad about for the rest of your life.  I love my parents very much, and I’ve made it clear to them many times now how much I appreciate all they did for me, and they also know how bad I feel about all of the financial burdens I put on them.  Still, having it so easy not only didn’t teach me the value of hard work, but it also left me with a distinct lack of ambition in life, simply because I never developed the type of a personality you need to have in order to succeed, and as such, success has always eluded me.  Oh sure, I have the occasional tastes of it now and then, but in general, I lack the innate ability to maintain it, and as such, it always ends up being a fleeting thing, leaving me with even less ambition than I had before simply because with every failure, I grow more and more tired of having the carrot of success dangled in front of my nose, only to have it yanked away time and time again.  I am a good person, and I’m highly intelligent, but unfortunately, that isn’t enough to succeed in life.  You really need to have one of two personality types to succeed in work or business.  You either have to be a “networker” or a “brown noser”.  Networkers  are the types of people who build up a great network of acquaintances to help them along the way in business.  You have to have a very outgoing personality for that.  Brown nosers don’t need a network.  They simply act like boot licking toadies to their bosses in order to get advancement.  You don’t need to be intelligent to be a brown noser, you just have to lick the boots of the right people and you can climb your way up the ladder of success.  As for me, I’m neither a networker nor a brown noser.  I’ve always had a great distaste for the shallowness of acquaintance relationships, and I refuse to brown nose anyone.  The biggest problem I have is that I an unable to deal with inept people (often brown nosers) not only being in positions of authority over me, but also making considerably more money than I do while my hard work does nothing more than make them look good and help them to get advancement while I am never offered advancement because I’m “too valuable” where I am.  Some people can deal with that sort of thing.  I can’t, and ultimately, it has always led to problems for me throughout my life.

As for time and patience, they’re two distinct and separate things, while at the same time, inseparably intertwined.  They say time is fleeting.  That is as true a statement as any, and as I look back upon my life, I can never really understand where all the time has gone.  While my memories of my childhood are limited, I have  always retained one special and distinct memory of a rainy day back when I was in the second grade.  I was leaning on a counter next to the windows and staring out across the courtyard over to where the seventh and eighth grade classrooms were, and I remember thinking to myself that one day I’d go to sleep and then suddenly I’d wake up and be in the seventh or eighth grade and I wouldn’t even realize that the time had passed.  Pretty deep thinking for a seven year old, isn’t it?  Still, I think I overshot the mark a bit…or just overslept, for not only did I make it through the eighth grade without realizing all the time that had passed, but now as I sit here at 38, all I can think to myself is, “What the hell???”.   Why time is so fluid and so fleeting I do not know, though I tend to believe that it’s because our lives are marked by milestones, and as we skip from one milestone to the next, all that occurred in between seems to be relegated to just being unimportant filler that is of little note or consequence.  We all have milestones in our lives.  I won’t list all of mine here, for they are numerous and of varying importance, but as for what happened in between each one…I really couldn’t tell you.  Oh sure I could mention a few things, but overall, the only thing I could really compare it to is watching a movie and fast forwarding to all the good scenes, skipping all the filler that happens in between.

That leads us to patience.  Lack of patience is probably the biggest bane of my existence.  With time as fleeting as it is, I have a really difficult time waiting for anything, simply because in the waiting, I feel like time has been wasted.  We are all cursed by a very limited time on this planet, and existing through all the filler simply to get from minor milestone to minor milestone can be torturous at best, because all of the time that was wasted could have been better spent if only that milestone had come sooner.  Often times it’s only a minor thing in the grand scheme of your life, but even the smallest of milestones means something, and the faster you can get to them, the more of them you can fit into your life, leaving you far more fulfilled in the end.  To use the film analogy again, it’s like the difference between watching a film with a lot of great scenes and very little filler to fast forward through, and watching a film with maybe four or five great scenes and a whole lot of filler to fast forward through.  I think we would all prefer our lives to be filled with great scenes, and to that end, the more closely we can pack those great scenes (or milestones) together, the more we can fit into our lives before it’s all over.  Filler is a waste, and there’s nothing more depressing than having your life dominated by it, so a lack of patience is simply a reflection of that.  It does however make life more difficult, as the eagerness to have things happen sooner rather than later often leads to disappointment and depression, both of which I’ve had in abundance in my life.

Is there a conclusion to all of this?  Not really.  It’s just something I was thinking about as I sit here in the dark at six a.m. on a Sunday morning.  I’m thinking about the day that lies ahead of me.  More likely than not, it will be yet another filler day.  Is that a bad thing?  Well, yes and no.  Sure it’s likely that nothing all that special will happen to me today, but then again, nothing all that bad is likely to happen either.  So I will simply exist, waiting impatiently for the next milestone of my life, and this day, like so many others, will eventually be forgotten entirely.  It’s depressing really, but it is true nonetheless.