I’ve given a lot of thought lately to getting what you want vs. what you need. It often seems that there is a great deal of injustice in the world. One person will be blessed with looks, intelligence, talent, connections, and wealth while another will be dumped into an existence where they are lucky to survive to adulthood and condemned to a subsistent way of life amid turmoil and danger. Even though this is true, there are times when the almost royally blessed will destroy themselves while someone who seemingly has nothing will rise to tower over those who live average lives, but those are the extremes of both conditions.
For most of us it is a matter of choices and opportunities. When you look back you can see the forks in the road where you went left or right or, for that matter, just didn’t choose which is a kind of choice and let life and those around you make you body surf on the swell of the waves of the selections made by others. Some of those events led to great sorrow, but eventually brought the gift of a great happiness that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been sent down that road in the first place. Then there are the times when a totally unexpected opportunity will present itself – a “free for nothing” chance that almost makes you gasp at your good fortune.
Much of our lives seem governed by fate and it is only in looking back that you can see that life itself is the “What You Need” and the best that most of us can do is to give someone else an opportunity whenever we can so that maybe, just maybe what goes around will come around again. Don’t ever be jealous of those who seem to have more because you never know what is happening in the lives of all those we see and meet.
Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favored and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good Morning!” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine — we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
