Taking Things for Granted

There are a whole lot of things we take for granted in life.  Breathing is definitely one we totally forget about, at least until we have trouble doing it.  This is something I know better than most, having nearly died from a lung-related illness.  But I was reminded of how I was once again taking the ability to breathe more or less normally earlier this week.  I was at a movie and I saw a woman trying to get up the stairway and into a seat in the aisle in front of me.  She was gasping for air the entire time and it wasn't until she turned around to put her coat on her chair that I noticed the nasal cannula.  That's the plastic tube that one puts into their nose in order to deliver oxygen from a tank or concentrator.

We take the presence of people in our lives for granted.  Until he fell ill, I considered my late father to be immortal.  I couldn't conceive that the day would come that he would no longer be with us.  With all of the trials and tribulations in our relationship, I still took for granted that he would always be there.  I know better now.

Every new day is a gift.  We may have problems or struggle with things but no matter how bad it gets for us, someone else is worse off somewhere.  In fact, there are a lot of someone else's out there who have it much worse.  I was peeved that things had gotten so bad that I was a little out of breath from just walking a block and then when I saw that woman gasping just for some air I stopped feeling sorry for myself.

We also take things people say for granted.  I heard a commercial tonight for a tax firm where the preparer who was talking about her experience said she'd done over 25,000 tax returns.  Tax season doesn't start on January 2nd, but let's pretend it does.  30 days in January, 28 days in February, 31 days in March and 15 days in April give us a tax season of roughly 104 days.  That's roughly 15 weeks.  That's roughly 600 hours if you work full-time.  I've never seen an H&R Tax Pro do more than 800 returns in one year.  25,000 / 800 per year = over 30 years of doing returns.  But the number of tax pros who can get in 800 returns in one year is about the same as the number of hen's teeth on a typical farm.  Very few.  So I'm not taking that number for granted.

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I was having a conversation about people who do a lot of different things in their lives.  I've been very fortunate to live an interesting life thus far, filled with a wide variety of careers.  And even though I've leapt around a lot career wise, the bulk of my work life was spent with two employers.  Ten years in the military and 17 years with the private school.  That's more than half of my life.  If you count adult life from 18 forward, that's 27/35ths of my adult life with two employers.

But that doesn't change the fact I've tried a bunch of different jobs to earn money and have fun.  In high school I tried fast food, busboy, server, shipping clerk, bowling alley porter, and scorekeeper at the same bowling alley.

While in the military, the part-time jobs I worked at, at various points included being the clerk at an adult bookstore, working at McDonald's, floorguard at a roller disco rink, DJ at the same rink, DJ at a different rink, DJ at a club, DJ for an FM station, reporter/anchor/writer/editor for a newsradio station and proposition poker player.  I won't even get into all of the different part-time jobs I worked at after leaving the military while working at other full-time jobs.

I guess I don't take the ability to work for granted either.