Cafe Jack: The Grass Is Always Greener

I was working on a few small projects around the house this week and thought to myself how pleasant it was to have a task that I can complete and see the results of my labor immediately and clearly.

Cleaning, painting, repairing, planting, building; all things you can do and see what you have done. I contrast those things with what we do as knowledge workers sometimes, and come up short on the satisfaction scale for the ethereal, fuzzy, abstract sort of tasks we sometimes are involved in as desk jockeys.

The fact that I read the "Death of Ivan Ilych" a night or two ago has colored my current thoughts. Here's a very abbreviated, summary of that story by Leo Tolstoy in the form of three quotes from the book -

----------------------

"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."

----------------------

"It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend."

----------------------

"Yes, I am making them wretched," he thought. "They are sorry, but it will be better for them when I die." He wished to say this but had not the strength to utter it. "Besides, why speak? I must act," he thought. With a look at his wife he indicated his son and said: "Take him away...sorry for him...sorry for you too...." He tried to add, "Forgive me," but said "Forego" and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand.

And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave his was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. "How good and how simple!" he thought. "And the pain?" he asked himself. "What has become of it? Where are you, pain?"

He turned his attention to it.

"Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be."

"And death...where is it?"

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.

"So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!"

----------------------

Ivan goes from a life of conformity, striving for material things, and outward appearances of happiness to sickness, despair, redemption and death in a very short span of time. Tolstoy was a born again Christian of sorts.

Without a personal philosophy, considering what is "The Good Life" as you define it, where are we? The unexamined life is not worth living, so they say. You wouldn't want to get to the end of your life and figure out you hadn't really lived at all.

The country western song "Live Like You Were Dying" written by Tim McGraw about his dad Tug McGraw, who died of brain cancer at 59, says it a different way -

He said I was finally the husband
that most the time I wasn't
and I became a friend a friend would like to have
and all the sudden going fishin
wasn't such an imposition
and I went three times that year I lost my dad
well I finally read the good book
and I took a good long hard look
at what I'd do if I could do it all again

and then
I went sky diving
I went Rocky Mountain climbing
I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named FuManchu
and I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter
and I gave forgiveness I'd been denying
and he said someday I hope you get the chance
to live like you were dying.

Like tomorrow was a gift and you got eternity to think about
what'd you do with it what did you do with it
what did I do with it
what would I do with it'

-----------------------------------

Which brings me back to the title of this post, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the mountain."

There's an old children's/camp song that addresses the idea that the grass is always greener somewhere other than where you are -

The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see.
And all that he could see, and all that he could see
Was the other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain

Ivan Ilych spent a fair amount of his life figuring out he could never earn enough money. He, like a lot of us, thought the grass would be greener on the other side of the mountain.

The point being we need to live where we are, examine our life and goals, continually define and redefine a personal philosophy of what makes a good life and then follow that path. Tolstoy thought it was never too late to do that. It's a Christian thought that you can find redemption at any point in your life. It's never too late.

-----------------------------------------

I'll close this off with the quote from that great thinker Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies that's embedded at the top of my blog -