Ten Thousand Hours

It is said that it take ten thousand hours to get good at something. I think this must be true because it took at least this long for me to get good enough in school to pursue further studies. It also means that in order to get really good at something, you have to spend more than an hour a day doing it, because it would then take over 25 years to get good at something. Most of us do not have that kind of time.

I think a lot about how I spend my time during the day. If I am like most people, work has a way of taking the wind out of our sails. After a day of work, there is something therapeutic about clicking the remote control. It may be that it is the one thing that we do have control over in any given day. For me, television is a way to think about something else for a while. Unfortunately, the many ads there are for anti-depressants and other sad conditions makes it difficult to stake out some peace of mind.

It has been a long time since I have felt carefree. There was one time three years ago, walking in the woods that I felt at peace. Otherwise, it is as if there is an anvil suspended above my head secured by a precariously frayed rope. I ask, "Is it going to fall today?" While this does create un-welcomed anxiety, I suppose that it is positive stress that keeps me going from day to day and week to week. Still, I long for a simpler time.

We are to live but once in these temporal bodies of ours, and so we are required to grow. That is why we do not, and cannot turn back the clock. Even if I could reach my ideal past, I would be out of place because time has worked on me. That is to say, I have lived through time, and the current me could not exist in a past self. We live in time, so we have to work with what we have, which can only be the future.

It is more difficult than ever before to be optimistic about the future. From every media outlet imaginable, we have been told that everything is going to get worse. Almost everyone I know clings to their jobs, for the fear of financial ruin in their life if they tried to do something else with their lives. The burden of student loans conjures up thoughts of the company store of the past. We all have student loans to service, and we are tied to a job until this debt is paid. Of course, unlike the company store situation we free to leave the position that we are in for another, possibly more lucrative one, but this is unlikely given the extended negative economic situation.

Will we learn anything from our current economic situation? As for myself, I have learned to be more scared about the loss of income. I think fear is the one thing that we are going to take from this situation. It is true that we can overcome fear, but there are few places to turn for encouragement without whitewashing the situation. That is to say, beyond those who wholesale deny that we have a problem in this country, there is no message of balance in acknowledging our problems but offering solutions to solve them.

Make no mistake that our problems in the United States are beyond economic - they are social, political, and moral. For example, as some have said, it should be at least as hard to get married as it is divorced. I do not know how you could make it this difficult, but I think if people had a good conception of what it was like to be married, there would be fewer divorces. This does not mean that people would live together before they were married, but it would involve some exercise in having a better knowledge about who you are marrying, and working out true compromise and sharing.

I do not have all of the answers, and I have the ever-present fear of restating what has been said time and time again. But if everyone feels this way, nothing is said. To err on the side of caution in this case means saying something, even if is repetitive.