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I had breakfast with a 50 year-old Dentist. We’d never met, so we spent the first few minutes on our personal history.
He began with the present day of being a Dentist. I asked how long he’d been practicing. He grinned: “Well, not quite as long as you’d think. I spent a few years doing other things.”
I laughed. “Yep, in other words, you rambled.”
“Yeah, I was rambling.”
His rambling was a little different than mine. He rambled through studies in microbiology, surgery on rats, and working in a hospital.
His Dad was a Dentist, and of course was pushing his son to be one, too. And quite naturally, his son wasn’t going for it. “Yeah, I guess I kind of bucked against my Dad a good bit early on.”
Over the course of several years, he found himself in situations where 50-something year-old men were pushing their younger co-workers into corners, forcing them to do things the way the older men had done them, just because the older men had done them that way.
Plus, he noticed that older men had grown bitter after years of being part of a machine they’d learned to hate.
I asked him: “Do you think this happens in every profession?” He thought a minute, and agreed that he had seen it in every profession he’d been exposed to. I said I, too, had seen the same thing in my various experiences.
So we had arrived at a place of mutual understanding at this moment, by sharing our observations of how men grow angry, and how they move from anger to bitterness.
This led us to talking about the number of people who work each day at jobs they hate. We talked about the men we’ve met who feel trapped by their jobs and their life. My new friend talked about the people he’d heard of using drugs or alcohol to self-medicate a life they couldn’t bear to live.
My friend counted himself as lucky that he had rambled. He knew he was lucky to have arrived at a place where he did work he enjoyed. He was grateful to live a life where he enjoyed waking up each day.
He said: “You know, you pay a price for the rambling. In hindsight, I could have been a lot further ahead by now if I’d done things differently. But I think maybe I’m better off in a lot of ways that money can’t buy.”
We talked about how our parents taught us things we carry inside each day.
Then, my new friend looked at his watch. “Well, gotta go to a meeting. I’ll see if I can shake ‘em up a bit.” He grinned as we stood together and shook hands.
As he turned to go, he said: “You know, it’s really pretty simple. Every day, you’ve got to make the decision to live. And if you don’t make that decision, then you automatically make the decision to start dying that day.”
(Editor’s Note: Contact David Clark at P.O. Box 148, Cochran, GA 31014, or dclark@outofthesky.com.)
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