One of the many things that I discovered after becoming an adult is simply that I had way too many things to attend to. As a kid and later as a teen, as with most kids and teens, I was not really responsible for anything. But, now, all of a sudden, responsibilities add up one after another during adulthood.
There were one too many things to take care of, and the list seemed to grow with the passing of every year. Perhaps even with the passing of every month. Once, as a graduate student, I somehow forgot to pay the electricity bill to the LA DWP. It was easy for such things to happen. After all, in what now seems like a prehistoric era, bills came by mail, and we typically sat down over weekends to write the checks, stuck them in the envelopes, fixed postage on them, and then dropped them off at a mailbox.
Finally, we made sure that there was enough money in the bank to cover all those checks. Oh, every month we had to also make sure that the bank's statement of how much we had in the account matched our own records; if not, it meant hours of head-splitting paperwork trying to figure out where we messed up.
Remember those days? You see the number of steps involved? One miss, and the result is a warning from the utility company that the power will be shut off within a set number of days.
Turned out that the graduate school days were simple and easy compared with life that followed. The number of businesses that billed me every month seemed to have quadrupled. As a former colleague joked, everybody wants to grab our wallets!
Meanwhile, there was a full time job with hours to maintain, unlike graduate school days when I could work according to my pace and schedule. Then having to track the daughter's schedule and her payments for piano classes, voice lessons, and whatever else. Scheduling dinners with friends. Chalking out vacation plans, which meant calling up hotels, airlines, rental car agencies, or going to a travel agent's office.
And then the surprises. Like when a Swedish teenager came to stay with us for three weeks during the hottest stretch of the San Joaquin Valley summer, and the air conditioning unit conked out. Or the time when the hot water heater failed. Or the time that the spring in the garage door broke with a loud noise.
When a couple of plumbers came to fix the broken hot water heater, one of them suggested that I should put some effort into cleaning up the garage. A random guy walking into my home and adding to the list of chores?
What happens to a person who might not be capable of handling all these things? Should we be sympathetic towards those who seem to lack the skills to juggle the work that comes with adulthood? Should we shrug our shoulders and move on when they fail?
When going about our walks or driving around, we see homes overflowing with stuff. Or, their yards are a sorry mess. Could it just be that they do not know how to manage their lives?
In my classes, I have often remarked--in appropriate contexts--that students will benefit a lot in their lives if they learnt to manage three things in life. Yep, only three things: Their health, money, and time. Unfortunately, we don't really teach students about these, and we leave it to them to figure things out. Evidence leads me, a guy who couldn't hold on to his job, to conclude that not many have mastered these three.
Ready or not, the buck stops with us adults--students and masters alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment