Inside the shadow of our minds

As long as man has been capable of rational thought, we've been asking why people do the things they do.

Why does a married woman have a long-term affair with a man she knows she'll never live with? Why does a man risk his family, his career and his reputation for a fling with someone he never would have even dated when he was single? Why do people kill, rape, steal and murder?

Why is some country always at war, either internally or externally? Why can't we make the world a better, more hospitable, place to live?

We've asked these questions from religious, secular, emotional, behavioral, psychological and psychiatric perspectives and have yet to find an answer. Yet we still wrestle with them because of our egotistical need to answer every question and prove our natural superiority by doing so.

I think, at some level, we all know that the world is not only unfair but also random. Some people are born dirt-poor and socially deprived and yet scale the heights of popularity and success because of some talent or intellectual ability they have. Others are born with a silver spoon in their mouths and never do anything that leaves a positive impression on them or others. Most of us end up where we are not because of a well-thought out plan but because of accident and happenstance.

McCook is my adopted home. I don't ever plan on moving away because some of the most cherished friends and indelible memories I've ever had are here. But McCook was not a plan I had long ago that came to fruition. McCook was purely an accident. I left college teaching for awhile to pursue a speaking and writing career and soon realized that was a mistake. The old saying goes that we don't know what we have until we don't have it anymore and that was true for me. Teaching had become my definition and I missed it more than I could have ever thought possible. So I started applying for teaching positions again and McCook Community College just happened to be one of those institutions of higher learning that was hiring. My wife didn't come with me because, up until then, I had never had a job for more than four years before I felt a need to move on and she thought that pattern would continue to repeat itself.

But it didn't.

We all try to predict future behavior based on what people have done in the past and that's a slippery slope to say the least. Unless someone is a chronic liar and we know they are, we believe what they tell us and plan out our lives around their words, only to be disappointed and sometimes, devastated, when things don't happen the way they were supposed to.

We marry thinking, even expecting, that we'll live happily ever after with the person of our dreams but few do. We take a job or move to a new house or buy a new car thinking this is all we need to make us happy but we sooner or later find out that it isn't. We sometimes turn to religion only to ultimately be disappointed in that too because of all the bad things that happen to us during the course of our lives and find it hard to fathom that God has a plan when our world is falling down around us.

We make friends and lose them. We fall in love and out of love. And we keep on doing it because we're sure, despite all our heartaches and disappointments of living this imperfect life, that true happiness is right around the corner. But it never is.

Because regardless of who we are or what we have, we all have disappointments, breakups, heartache, loss and sadness and we always will. And no matter how deep and devastating our tragedies are to us, we're constantly amazed to see that the rest of the world is working the way it always has, paying little or no attention at all to our own difficulties.

We want everyone to share in our pain but they don't. They never have and they never will.

So, despite whatever crutch or false hope one chooses to rely on, our lives and whatever happiness and contentment we find are ultimately up to us and us alone.