the "Why Me's"

I don't know how to respond to the "Why Me's".   During the most challenging era of my life, when my youngest son was using heroin and who knows what else, I did a little of the "Why Me?".  Mostly though, I felt I was living a surreal life, a life that belonged in the ghettos, and to people of different socioeconomic classes, not to me, a self-proclaimed average person.  That era was an incredibly rough awakening, a step in my hopeful growth towards wisdom, when I realized that in this life, NOBODY is exempt.  NOBODY.

Sometimes, when my fellow conversationalist is entrenched in a "why me" narrative, there is an evident path which led to the consequence of the "why me".  Depending on the person to whom I am listening, I sometimes point this out.  Like, what did you expect driving with no brakes??

Sometimes the crisis or unpleasant situation is clearly random.  Again, nobody is exempt from even these times.  Sometimes a bear shits in the woods, and sometimes in your yard, and eats your chickens and knocks over your honey bees.  Sucks.  Options?  Move someplace where there are no bears.  Not an option for you?  Take up hunting.  Still not a solution?  Then learn to live with it and buy your eggs and honey at a store and take up carpentry.  Whatever.

Curiously, I can't recall a single time where I've heard, "I've won a million dollars in Publisher's Clearinghouse.  Ohhhhh, why me?".

It is the worst for me, when I am really swallowing contempt and disgust for the younger set, the 20 somethings.  I listen not without understanding of the challenges of beginning an independent life, the set backs, the hoops and hurdles our culture/society hurls at all of us, and can feel huge to someone just starting out.  But stop.  Take a look around.  THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of other people have managed it.  Not without set-backs, and not without making mistakes, but we have managed it.  When a 23 year old says, "It's so hard to work, I'm so tired, and my car needs work, and I'm having a hard time paying for my cell phone plan which is like $200 a month.....ad nauseum",  I hear, "It's so hard to be grown up."  No argument there.  Not a lot of other options to choose from, either.  At least none I would choose.  The most awful follow-up to such a rant is, "but OTHER PEOPLE don't have these problems!".  Jesus wept.  Open your eyes, your brain, your horizons...open anything that will help you see that OTHER PEOPLE have problems YOU don't, or they don't have ENOUGH to even HAVE the problems you do!"  OTHER PEOPLE have little to do with my life, or yours.  Trust me, that is really true.  Nobody but me is digging my trench of woe and despair.


Why you?  Because you are alive, enmeshed in a world where the universe rules, and choices have consequences, and sometimes even expected consequences can be random and unexpected.  Which means, neither I, nor you are in charge of most things.  Just what we do with these situations we find ourselves in.  As for me, I don't have enough waterproof gear to stand endlessly in a pity puddle full of my own tears.  Think I'll just scoop up that puddle of water and throw it on my roses.

Peace,
Elfscooter