It's time to get real about what we expect from life

Once in a while, something just strikes you as poignant (or at least worthy of a blog post). Today was one of those days.

My office building is located just across the street from a fire station. Sure enough, several times a day, the relative silence of the neighborhood is shattered by the wail of sirens from a ladder truck or two, typically accompanied by an ambulance.

In other words, someone somewhere on the receiving end of those fire trucks is having a bad day. Short of monitoring a police scanner all day, there’s no way of knowing what has caused this alarm - it could be an oven fire, heart attack, explosion or even a car accident requiring the “jaws of life.”  Regardless, something is wrong and the fire department has been dispatched to make it right, or at least a little bit better.

Today, this helped me put things in perspective a bit. No matter how hard we try, there’s always something out of whack somewhere. Every day, somebody’s day sucks, or there’s a terrible accident, illness, or issue in need of being fixed. And sometimes there’s nothing you can do to fix it. This goes for relationships, work, weather, the economy, health – everything. It is futile, irrational and just plain foolish for any of us to sit here and think nothing bad will ever happen to us, or our friends and relatives.

I admit, however, that I sometimes think this way. I go along and think that life is only good if nothing bad ever happens to me or my loved ones. I’ve been told that this is a family trait – as if somehow we rate the quality or success of our lives by the lack of conflict and absence of problems. And I suspect I’m not alone in this.

This brings me back to the fire station – where yet another truck has just departed. Think about it, if bad things were truly completely avoidable, there’d be no need for that fire station, no ambulances, no doctors and hospitals, no counselors, no police, no armies, no pharmacies and no conflicts of any kind.

Since that’s not realistic, maybe, just maybe, we should start trying to live with a bit more perspective. Bad things will happen, yes, but for most of us, life is pretty good most of the time. The sooner we accept that perfection isn’t possible, the sooner we won't expect any different.