Okay, I am doing something a little different today.
Whenever I see someone on a TV show talking about (or writing a book about) their personal problems, I must confess that I always look somewhat askance on such goings on. My Ohio farm boy suck-it-up-and-stop-complaining stoicism usually revolts at such things. But today I am going to go against that long-standing policy. I am not doing this to elicit pity or to be maudlin and dramatic, I am doing it because it will serve to make a point, I promise. Okay, get out your handkerchiefs:
About four years ago I went through the worst case scenario of what a lot of people are facing today. Long story short, I lost my house. It wasn’t really my house, I had just been renting the same apartment for 23 years. I loved this place– I had a huge seven room top floor of a duplex, plus the attic for storage, half the basement, and a bay in the garage. Great location, walk to everything, and all this, for what eventually added up to about 25% of market rate. I had friends who told me I was committing grand larceny by living there, but I had this eccentric landlord who wasn’t into making money on the house, he was busy doing other stuff, so he never raised the rent, and it was a fab situation all around.
Well anyway, long story short, one day he decided to sell the house. I was a "tenant at will," so after living in the same place for 23 years, I had all of 90 days to get out. Oy.
I was of course somewhat traumatized by all this, and just downright scared– having lived in such a cushy environment so long, I wasn’t sure how I was going to fare when facing the realities of the Boston housing market at going rates.
So I had to do some serious soul searching . . . about having to make more money, where I wanted to move to, and so on. I had a long talk with myself, and finally said, "you know, I have always wanted to be a published author, and gosh darn it, if I am going to fail in life, I am at least going to fail at something I want to do."
I had already had some small success as a playwright, and I had this manuscript for a book (Real Men Don’t Rehearse) that I had been working on for 2 years. I had been shopping it around to literary agents for a year to no effect, and I said, "Well, sink or swim, if these agents and publishers don’t want it, I’ll just publish it myself."
At the same time I thought, "You know, I have always had this hidden desire to be one of those inspirational/motivational speakers. But how does one do that?" I had no clue. I called a friend of mine and said, "I have decided to become a professional speaker. Do you have any idea where I can get started?" He put me on hold, came back a minute later, and said "You’re speaking at the Woburn Rotary tomorrow at 12:00." Boom. My speaking career, such as it was, had begun that quickly. I have to say, the wonderful thing about major adversity is, it opens up your mind to new ideas and solutions that may have seemed impossible before.
So I had some sense of a new direction, but I still had to pack up my possessions (and throw out 2/3 of them) and find a new place to put them. I found an apartment, I found a mover, and on a wintry March day, 3 feet deep in snow, I moved to a new apartment. The new place wasn’t much, but it was relatively cheap and had space for an office.
Well that move was traumatic enough, but I had no time to dawdle– I had to get to work on self-publishing a book for the first time. I had to learn Photoshop in order to design a cover, then I had to find a printer, etc. etc. Then the phone rang, and I was informed by a family member that my father had just gone in for a checkup and came out with a fast moving cancer. A prognosis of "8 weeks to live" shortened day by day with new phone calls . . ."He’s got 6 weeks . . no, 3 weeks . . . no, if you want to say goodbye, you better get home NOW."
So I made this trip home to Ohio. I spent a day in the hospice with my many siblings and nieces and what not. Everyone was pretty frazzled, they all went home, and I opted to just spend the night on a cot in the hospice with my dad.
Well early the next morning, the nurse comes in and we both discover that this is it, my dad is going to pass in the next half hour. So of course the staff is on the phones, calling my siblings, but too late . . . It was just me and him, and on my own I watched my father die.
Okay, well, such is life. Anyway, I have this one brother that had become estranged from the family, and later that day I decided he should not hear of his father’s death by reading about it in the paper, so I went over to his house and gave him the news. Long story short, he was happy to see me again, and we have since become closer than ever.
I came back to Boston and, in spite of all this tumult in my life, I hooked up with a brand new girlfriend. Then my book came out a week later. I had assumed that it would be one more of those vainglorious self-publishing failures, but instead I got some major national press and it has become a self publishing success story. It’s been out for four years now, and I am selling more and more of them all the time. I am kicking myself for having hesitated to publish it for so long.
Okay, enough about me. Here is the payoff:
I have come to the realization that human beings are born problem solvers.
We all complain about our problems, but problem solving, far from being an onerous task, is actually a compulsion for most people. You would think that, after a long day of solving problems at work, people would avoid problem-solving after work. But instead, we do sudoko and crossword puzzles on the train home. After dinner, we sit down in front of a television set and watch dramas, game shows, or reality shows, where we watch people doing . . . Anyone? Anyone? Why, solving problems of course. Every "Law and Order" starts with a problem, i.e., an unsolved murder, every "Survivor" episode shows us people that are problem-solving like mad, and I end up devoting an entire hour of my life to watching it because I’m so interested in seeing how they’re going to solve this problem.
Our problem-solving compulsion is often a problem all by itself. Many times people will present their problems to you, but they don’t want a solution; the expression of a problem is just a medium of connecting to you and seeking sympathy. So in that case, you solve the problem by . . . not solving the problem.
And I was actually glad all these problems had come my way, as my old situation had been, at one time, a great solution to a problem. But that solution had gotten stale. I needed a new problem to solve in order to get to a much better place in life. Weird.
Anyway, what we have before us right now as a society is a rather large and complex puzzle. And we’re still in the "diagnosis" phase, which is always vexing, as you can’t solve a problem until you know just exactly what the problem is. But we have the capacity to solve it.
It is easy to get afraid of big puzzles that don’t have the solution on page 6. It’s also easy to think that the problem is too big, or perhaps your personal puzzle-solving ability is too small. You can also get twisted up in solving potential problems before they ever arrive (this is also known as worrying).
And there are many people who want you to hire them to solve your puzzle for you, so they emphasize the problem’s bigness and your own problem-solving smallness. But what I take, not only from my own recent experiences, but from my studies of history, is that human beings, even average, run-of-the-mill human beings, are amazing puzzle solvers. It’s what we do as a species.
Granted, we create puzzles too, and when we come up with solutions, we don’t always agree on which is the best one. But no matter how big of a puzzle you may have to solve today, well, I have great faith in your ability to solve it. I would offer you my own solutions to your problems, but I bet they would be nowhere near as good as the ones you come up with yourself. So whatever the economic "crisis" is doing to you, hey, yes, we have some big problems here, but it’s nothing your amazing brain can’t eventually solve. Been there, done that. And you can do it too.
© Justin Locke
