I’m concerned about a lot of things, the zombie apocalypse not least among them. I’ve seen enough movies to know that a terrible fate awaits us all. Between the startling lack of biodiversity among our crops, the likelihood of antagonistic aliens, supersmart-mutant chimps of our own making, biological warfare gone awry, and Facebook, what chance of survival do we have?
But real-life, everyday, mundane disasters? Why bother worrying about those? That’s simply tedious and exhausting. Could I be hit by a car while on my daily walk? Sure. But unless that car is veering out of control because of the rapture, meh. I don’t have time to waste my anxiety on lackluster tragedy that isn’t even worthy of an Amazon Prime original. Thus far, I’ve found this life doctrine to have served me well by lowering my overall stress and the stress of those around me.
I’m not calling for people to be neglectful or ambivalent. I’m just saying I think we could all benefit from relaxing a bit when it comes to our unavoidable existence in this big, bad world and our inevitable failure to control it.
Coming fresh off of the news that my oldest son is bombing English due to not turning in something like half of his assignments, I’ll use him as an example. When he was a toddler, I spent a stint as Mr. Mom. For half the week, I would stay at home during the day so my wife could work. On most of these days, I’d take the wee bugger to the nearby city park where all the other stay-at-home mothers were busy helicopter parenting their own precious rugrats.
I’ll not go so far as to say my parenting style is groundbreaking or the vanguard of affirmative parenting theory, but you know, it’s pretty close. The secret is to love your kid while not getting too uptight about the stuff they do. On one day in particular, I decided to check on the boy when from a short distance it looked like he was hamster-cheeking a large rodent. On closer inspection, I found the very last few links of a bike chain dangling from his overstuffed lips. Gripping the end of the chain, I gently withdrew, one link at a time, what ended up being the entire bike chain.
The boy seemed unruffled by the affair. After a quick look around to see if anyone else had witnessed the matter (they had not), I tossed the chain in the garbage, and we went on our way. I made a mental note: sucking on greasy bike chains is not as detrimental to overall wellbeing as I had previously suspected. I suppose a more attentive parent would have slapped the bike chain out of the kid’s hand before he got it in his mouth. But then how would he learn the taste of grease? I suppose I could have forced my son to turn in all his English assignments, but then I wouldn’t have had time to research the construction of our doomsday bunker.
And in the end, I simply can’t control everything. If I have to choose between sweating eighth-grade English (all over again) or sweating the end of the world, I’ll choose the end of the world every time. Besides, the doomsday bunker is something we can build together, and those memories will last even through World War Zed.
At the Desk This Week
Only one episode left of the third season of The Green Ones and I’ll be done with my final rewrite. Then I’ll get it copy edited, and it will be ready to roll. I’ve added some more back and neck stretches and exercises to my old-man-desk-jockey routine. Hopefully those will extend my career expectancy! No new signs of the end times this week, that I can tell. Just all the same old stuff. So, as long as we are all still around next week, I’ll be back. Until then…
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