The Greatest Lesson I've ever Learned

Time Frame: 2010ish-2015

As kids we are in such a rush to grow up. We have this fairy tale view of what life is going to be like. We believe in the concept of happy endings, and knights in shining armor, and perfect princesses that always win. We look at the world with rose colored glasses.

        

    As we grow older we realize that it’s not the monsters under our beds that we should fear, but the ones that dwell within our thoughts. Yes, I just quoted Batman. I happen to be a major Batman fanatic, but that’s not the point here. The point is that its fear and doubt that haunt us. Our worst enemy is ourselves.

            I never intended to write this entry. I never planned on this vignette series (or whatever you want to call it) hitting so close to home. I never thought I’d be writing about my present in a book about the past. But you know what? Even if this is only the fourth installment in Rookie Mistakes, there are rules I live my life by –a personal code I follow –and one of those rules is to always write about what scares you and, right now, what scares me most is myself.

            I don’t know where I’m going in life, but I’m coming to peace with that. It seems to me that everything I’ve experienced has been for a reason. What I went through last year prepared me for this year. What I went through three years ago is still effecting me today. Even things that happened way back when I was a child still have an impact on my life.

It’s levels. It’s building blocks. That’s what life is. Each stage we go through makes us stronger and better prepares us for the next level. There’s a song my brother likes that says, “Life is like a video game, trying hard to beat the stage.” Despite the mild vulgarity in the song, the guy who wrote it had a point. I mean, think about it. Just for a second, really think about it. When we’re born we all start out at level one. We’re rookies. We know nothing about this world. We have our instincts, but we have to rely on nurture as well as nature to get us socialized and assimilated, and all those other aspects of integrating ourselves into the way humans live.

At the time of birth we are blank slates going through a tutorial phase. As we grow we ‘level up’. We learn more things and apply them to each new stage we face. Along the way, we’re attacked. We get hit by bosses. We get knocked over by the right hook of jealousy and stabbed by the knife of gossip. We find ourselves in situations we’ve never faced before with a big old, bad guy staring death beams at us…and we look down and think that the sword in our hand –all the experience we have stored up –is nothing but a toothpick compared to the beast in front of us. Yet, we prevail. We push through and overcome. Just like in a video game.

            The thing is, recently in life, I made a choice that lead me to a new boss. That boss has many names and many faces. She likes to attack in the night and whisper all sorts of words that make my stomach churn. She invades my dreams. Haunts my thoughts. She’s constantly telling me that I’m not good enough, that I’m making nothing out of my life, that nothing I do matters, that everything is going to fall apart…the list goes on and on.

            By this point you’ve probably realized that the tone of this particular entry is not the comical light-hearted one associated with the purpose of the collection. I’m sorry for that, yet, this must be said.

            I am battling myself. I am battling the world and judgement. I am at a stage in my life that I never wished to be at again.

            I’m at the stage of reawakening. I’m once again trying to find my place and trying to build a reputation up within that place. The people I work with, both at my workplace and at my church, don’t know me. How could they? I’ve been somewhat of a ghost to them. I came around seasonally. Whenever the university was on break. But now there are no more breaks. This is my life. I live here. That doesn’t make the ghost any less important though.

            Before May, 2015, I went through a stage of life where I attended the university. I learned a lot while there. I learned that for an English major I have a really relaxed form of grammar. I learned that I gained more knowledge and wisdom from just being with my friends than I ever did from a text book. I learned that I probably chose the wrong major (I should have totally gone with Culinary Arts or Sociology). I had a math professor that surprisingly managed to teach me enough to get me through my College Algebra course (Seriously, that guy deserves like a reward or something. I gave up on a test once in his class and wrote on it that I didn’t ‘Math’…yes, I used it as a verb. I got that from my high school English teacher. He –the math professor -didn’t fail me for turning in the test mostly incomplete and with that little remark written next to a Batman I sketched. You know what he did? He let me retake it and sat down with me for a bit to explain –in detail- why the heck functions work the way they do. He should have totally just failed me. I would have been totally okay with it…but he didn’t.) However, the most important lesson I ever learned came from working at the university cafeteria.

            In the Spring of 2015, we were preparing for the biggest event on the University campus. President’s Honors. All hands were on deck. Everyone was expected to pitch in and work as long as they could to help out. One of our bosses had only been working there for a year and it was his second time hosting the event. His first time hosting it without someone showing him the ropes. He, a coworker, and I were sitting in what was known as the Fireside room….because, well, it was the room on the side of the cafeteria that had a fireplace. Inventive name, I know. Don’t judge. Remember the rule with this collection. No judging.

        

    Anyway, the three of us were tasked with folding napkins for the event. When there’s over four hundred napkins to fold in a bishop style it takes as many hands as possible So even the Cashiers helped when they had some down time. We were just sitting there, our hands going through the motions on autopilot as we made the right creases on the navy blue cloth napkins. Our mouths were conversing about the event itself.

            “You should have seen it last year,” Samantha –yeah, we’ll call her Samantha –said as she placed a successfully folded napkin in a crate to the side of us. “The chefs convinced me to try this thing that looked like caviar but it wasn’t. That stuff was nasty.”

            Arthur crack a smile. “What was it?”

            “Balsamic vinegar and something else…Jell-O, I think. It was supposed to go on the mousse.”

            “I remember that,” I agreed.

            Samantha looked at me. “And then all those chocolate cups broke, remember?”

            “And half of our salad dressing dishes had to be rewashed,” I added.

            “And that one chef got made because he and another chef were telling us to prepare the salads two different ways.”

            “And the dishwasher broke.”

            “And we didn’t have enough help until the day of the event,” Samantha shook her head. 

“Geesh, that was a fun adventure. Then again, all events are.”

            “So true,” I stated as I worked at unwrapping a package of napkins that needed folding.

            “Stop it. You’re going to jinx us by talking about all that,” Arthur complained. “Everything needs to go right this time.”

            Samantha and I shared a glance before bursting into laughter.

            “Oh, Arthur,” Samantha chided. “Everything’s not going to go right. Everything’s absolutely going to go wrong.”

            “Way to be positive,” he rolled his eyes.

            “No, she’s serious,” I added. “Everything always goes wrong, but then everything works out.”

            “It’s sort of how every event works. It’s like a rule they all follow. Everything will go wrong before it goes right.”

            Everything will go wrong before it goes right, those words that Samantha said that day have stuck with me even after I graduated. They are, in fact, the greatest lesson I’ve ever learned.

            Right now, it seems like I keep getting hit. Like I won’t defeat this boss in front of me and that the different children’s events I’m planning for the church are all going to fail, but I keep telling myself that one simple rule. Why? Because she’s right. Everything, even in life, will go wrong before it feels like anything goes right. That’s just how it goes. But no matter how much crud we face –I’m talking about all of you out there reading this –there will be something that goes right.

            My freshman year at the university I had an Introduction to Physics professor that once started class by saying, “Even the darkest corners of space are never truly dark.” He went on to explain that light was present everywhere in the universe. That true darkness basically doesn’t exist. I mean, it exists, but it doesn’t. Confusing, yeah. Anyway, while he was rambling about stars and planets, and the way the universe works, while ending every sentence with the word, ‘K’ (I’ve heard from some reliable sources that he’s actually gotten better about not doing that…the ‘K’ thing, that is.) I was thinking about how accurate the phrase is when it comes to life.

            We may think that everything’s going wrong, but that’s just because we haven’t found that light yet. Just because things aren’t going your way and you’re frustrated with the universe, that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up and shut off your game console. That boss you’re facing, whatever it may be, is temporary. There’s something wonderful just on the other side of it. So look for that light. Look for something to go right. Because, let me tell you, everything will seem to go wrong before anything goes right.