The study of numerology is a interesting one. I never looked
into before but lately I’ve been delving a little deeper. I guess it all
started when I was listening to a podcast about it. I don’t know if I believe
in it but lately I’m not closing off any ideas so I thought I would do a little
research. I also started thinking back to when my current struggles took root
and it was 7 years ago. There are so many instances of 7 being a significant
number in all types of cultures and religions. Haven’t we all heard the proverb
that says, “Break a mirror and have 7 years of bad luck?” In many religious cultures, 7 is a
significant number. In Christian belief, God created the world and rested on
the 7th day. In sects of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs belief, there
are 7 major energy systems in the body (chakras). In Islam, Muslims, on their
pilgrimage to Mecca walk 7 times around the center of the sacred mosque. In
Jewish wedding ceremonies, there are 7 blessings. There are 7 deadly sins, 7
colors of the rainbow, 7 days of the week, 7 continents, it is even pervasive
in modern pop culture: 7 Harry Potter Books, James Bond is 007, Snow White and
the 7 dwarfs, George Costanza wanted to name is baby 7. It seems to be a number of great significance
throughout history and across many cultures. I am hoping it signifies shift in
my life – my 7 years of bad luck are finally coming to an end maybe? I can’t say the last 7 years were all bad but
the litany of things that went wrong is nothing to scoff at. My last 7 years in
a nutshell: left a stressful/job career at the start of 2009 and suffered 3
separate periods of unemployment over those years, went through some schooling
to change careers, suffered with a serious illness, lost a pet to a serious
illness, went through an apartment fire where we were “homeless” for 2 weeks,
went through hurricane sandy, moved 4 times, 3 times to different states, had a
total of 7 jobs, 3 of which lasted a total of 6 months. And that is just what I
went through personally. My husband also had 3 bouts of unemployment, one which
caused us to have to hire a lawyer and go through a trial. He also suffers from
illness and went through a few bad doctors and bad pills. This is to say
nothing of the emotional and mental trauma we endured through all of this. I
have felt defeat, self-loathing, disappointment, anxiety, sadness, worry and
hopelessness. Throughout of course there was joy and laughter and genuine
happiness but when I reflect on this time, it is one overshadowed by very
difficult emotions. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t complain because there are
so many people out there going through worse. I should feel lucky that I have a
roof over my head, food to eat and someone who loves me. And the fact is, I DO
feel incredibly grateful for those things but I also have a right to express my
feelings of frustration and sadness and defeat about the state of my life. I
have to honor the way I feel about what has transpired in my life so I can
learn and grow from my experiences and move on. The last thing I want is to be
bitter for the rest of my life about the turns my life has taken. I think that
the only way to avoid bitterness is to acknowledge the “negative” feelings and
try to work through them. For me, that is through writing, yoga, meditation,
talking to trusted loved ones and nurturing myself. Being brutally honest here is also helping.
It does no good to mask these emotions all the time – all it does is stuff them
down and make you an overall angry person which I am innately not.
I’ve been reflecting a lot about the role upbringing and
social status plays into financial and career success in life. There is a
certain expectation that comes with your station in life. I was born into a
working class family. My Dad worked full time and my Mom stayed home and raised
the family. We never wanted for anything but I knew even at a young age that we
weren’t as well off as others. We always shopped at discount stores and wore
hand me downs but there was so much joy and love in my family that it made up
for the lack of material things that seem so important when you are a kid. My Dad worked hard his whole life and he and
my mother are both children of immigrant parents. It’s the classic American
dream story- all 4 of my grandparents emigrated here from Lithuania at the turn
of the century to seek a better life. Their story is one of great struggle and
sacrifice and I believe that my parents learned from them and wanted to give
their children a better shot at a successful, happy life. I bring this up
because sometimes I feel like I have failed my parents and grandparents. They
fought hard so that future generations didn’t have to and here I am going
through unemployment struggles and financial struggles similar to what they
went through. I know my struggles are nowhere
near what they had to endure: sometimes they went without heat in the frigid
Boston winters and had only potatoes for dinner. I was hoping to honor their
sacrifice by creating a secure life for myself. Family, tradition and legacy are important to
me and a couple of years ago I did some delving into my family’s history and
learned some facts about what my grandparents went through but of course
nothing of the emotional toil it must have taken on them to be in a brand new
country not speaking the language and being alone. I can’t even imagine what it must have been
like to try and create a better life out of nothing. I am trying to create a better life for
myself and I have so many more advantages than they did. One of my goals is to
write their story one day because it deserves to be told. I think this is the
story of most Americans and it is what has made this country so great for so
many years but I fear we are losing the beauty of our ancestor’s sacrifices by
the direction our society is going: the rich getting richer and the middle
class all but disappearing.
I’ve been watching the Netflix documentary, “Making of a
Murderer.” It is fascinating television and I bring it up because it raises all
kinds of questions of education and class status and how that plays out in our
modern society. In a nutshell, the show tracks a poor, uneducated, working
class man who was wrongly convicted of a crime and imprisoned for 18 years and
when he gets out, he gets convicted of murder and is currently serving time for
it although he claims he is innocent. It is a story of corruption, greed and
inequality. In a recorded phone call to his parents from prison, he is saying
how he wants to just give up because he has no chance of getting out and in one
of the saddest lines of the whole show he says something like, “poor people
never win.” He is right –how he is supposed to raise enough money to pay for
the caliber of lawyer to defend his case where he gets a shot at redemption?
There is no chance. HE has no chance. That is what I am getting at here – do
any of us who were not born into money have a real chance at making it? How
much does our upbringing and social status play a role in who we become? It
seems like a great deal. This man was also uneducated. How much of that plays
into how successful we become?
The book, “Blink” by Malcolm McDowell raises all of these
questions and it’s fascinating to think about. Unlike Steven Avery, the man who
sits in prison for murder that he swears he didn’t commit, I have a college
education. I am intelligent and learned. I spent thousands of dollars on my
education so that I wouldn’t be in a position to have a minimum wage job at 40.
And here I sit. No, I am not in a prison cell but I am in a precarious place –
I can relate to the feeling of hopelessness Steven Avery feels. Does my college
education and 20+years of experience in the workforce amount to so little? Is
it all my fault? Did I just make terribly poor decisions these last few years?
Did I mismanage my money? Was I not ambitious or pushy enough? These are the questions that go through my
head often. I think that in the end life is just hard and shit happens. And it
happens to good, hardworking people all the time. Yes I made mistakes but I’m
human and humans make mistakes every day. I can’t sit here and bemoan the fact
that I have no money in the bank and not sure what my future looks like because
the only thing we really have is this moment. None of us really know what the
future brings so might as well do our best to enjoy the present moment. I’m
trying to let the past stay in the past and enjoy what is now. I can have hope
for the future but I can’t predict it. As Andy Dufrense says in The Shawshank Redemption,
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
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