on being manly

Recently I found myself having cocktails on a porch here in Our Fair City. Shocker, I know. I was chatting with a dear friend who is a closing attorney for a leading real estate law firm here in town. Pretty much everybody knows that the real estate market has taken quite a tumble here in town (and nationally), but the tendency among real estate professionals is to adopt a "Put on a happy face...make lemonade out of lemons...hey, this is just a correction" kind of attitude. Usually with clenched teeth and a hyper-forced grin.

Not my friend. He laid it out for me honestly (his statistics were staggering), and said, "Hey, I know I'm supposed to be all 'everything's fine here' about this, but I'm man enough to say it sucks, it will probably get worse before it gets better, and it's making a lot of people unhappy."

I was quite charmed by his honesty. I have a lot of friends in real estate, and many of them are swallowing the party Kool Aid and claiming that business is steady, people are buying, and things are lookin' up. Ahhh, the power of denial. All's I can say is that I'm REALLY glad I got out of that line of work - for a trilliion reasons, most of which were simply personal.

My friend's sincerity got me thinking about my own tendency to laugh wildly amidst severest woe. Not that I have any tragedy in my life or anything; I'm healthy, employed with work I love, and about to purchase the home that I will most likely live in forever. I have gifts and resources, friends and family, and little about which to complain.

But sometimes I get overwhelmed, and I'm coming to the realization that I'm not as good at handling it anymore. One of my biggest observations about people with problems is my opinion that many people build their own prisons - financially, romantically, spiritually - whatever. The harder thing to realize is that you've built your own prisons. Now, I have to figure a way out of them.

So, I took a walk today in my park, and made a mental sketch of the prisons I've built for myself. The task of breaking out of them is (to emply hyperbole) Herculean. But they are my own, I built them, and I can find a way to compromise their architecture.

A dear friend told me just last night that he has recently been completely overwhelmed with things. His discovery was that great things come ONLY when you are so burdened. I take those words deeply to heart.

I think I'll start by cleaning my kitchen.