There is an old story. Guy pulls into a gas station and asks the attendant, “I’m headed down the road to Scranton, moving there with my wife and family, what is it like? Is it a decent place to raise a family?” The attendant asks him where he is from? “I’m from Pittsburgh, a really shitty place. People aren’t friendly, it’s dirty, the local government is a mess, I couldn’t wait to leave.” The attendant looks at him and simply says “I expect you’ll find about the same in Scranton.”
A day later another guy pulls up and asks the same attendant, “I’m heading down the road to Scranton, moving there for work, what’s it like, is it a nice place for a family?” Again, the attendant asks where he is from? “We’re from Pittsburgh, and truthfully I hated to leave. The people are great, the government is doing a lot to help people and clean up the city, we had a great life there, lots of friends. Not perfect, but it was nice. It was a hard decision to relocate.” The attendant looks at him and says, “I expect you’ll find about the same in Scranton,”
I’m in Minnesota for a few days. Being originally from Wisconsin, I do love this part of the world, it feels very much like home. The landscape is dotted with ponds, lakes, rivers, and marshes. There is something about water that is to me mesmerizing, calming. One can imagine living here, waking up each morning to a sunrise over the lake.
But I remember saying the same thing about Montana when we moved there so many years ago. Neither place is perfect, the muggy mosquito days of the Midwest summers can be as much a misery as the dry windswept dog days of August in the high plains. There is good and not so good everywhere.
I always thought moving to a new place would be a fresh start. I moved from Wisconsin to Texas for work many years ago and at the time thought this was a fresh beginning. I was angry and depressed, my marriage to my second wife Diane was a mess, my life was a ball of ugly stress. I thought that a move across the country, a new job, new challenges, a new place would bring about a much needed change. I moved back to Wisconsin from Texas a few years later because the job was terrible, I didn’t like South Texas, and I felt as “stuck” as I did before I left Wisconsin in the first place.
Skip ahead years later, Diane had passed away. I was married to Cindy, and we had the opportunity to move to Ohio. A new job and career opportunity. My married life was great, but my work life was still drudgery. This seemed like a great chance to do something different, to gather some newfound enthusiasm for work and experience a new place. Though we both enjoyed our time in Ohio, my work life there after the move was even more chaotic and stressful than ever before. We spent five years there, and though we had some wonderful times traveling around the state, I spent my time at work still mostly angry and resentful, and brought that anger and resentment along with me.
When we decided to move to Lewistown in central Montana. I was on the road about 35 weeks a year. The move allowed Cindy the opportunity of spending more time with her grandchildren and her daughter. A much better life for her than she had in Ohio, where we had no family and few friends. At first for me it was idyllic, but after a while the stress of remote working, constant traveling, and the pressures brought on by increased responsibility began to eat me up. I ended up more depressed, more angry, and more disillusioned with life than ever.
I always thought that all of these new starts would fix everything. A new job, a new place to live, a new “thing.” But the truth that I have come to discover is that none of that changes anything. At least for me. Not if I bring the same “me” to all these places, to these new opportunities, to these new possessions. That gas station attendant was right. Like those families traveling to Scranton, we tend to let our attitudes color our world. Good and bad. If we look at life through the filter of anger, resentment, stress; that is how we will see the world. Whether it is really like that or not. Life is so much better when we remove that filter. It is not always evident, but if we look long enough and honestly enough, we will see more good in this world than bad.
What I have been chasing all my life has always been well within my reach. All that really needed to change was me. Not the job, not the place, not the thing. Just me! I finally realized that I can’t keep carrying the same angry, stressed, critical self everywhere I go and expect the world to look rosy. If I look at life through the lens of anger, stress, pain, judgment, then it doesn’t matter where I am, what I’m doing, what I have. Nothing will change. If I look out the window and want to find ugly, I can find it as easily on a cold, windy winter day as I can on a sunny, tranquil morning like the one I woke up to today. But with the filter removed, I can look outside on a gloomy, cloudy, rainy, windswept day and see beauty. I can find beauty in my own Scranton.
Over the course of these past few years I’ve worked hard to find good in what was left to me. I’m not all the way there yet, but I am a hell of a lot closer. I’ve found more good than I had ever imagined possible. More to be happy for. In friends, in family, in people I simply bump into walking down the street. In the cold wind in my face during a winter morning run, and in the warm sunlight in my face when the trail opens up to a clearing. Whether looking up at a beautiful stone Cathedral, or looking down at trash cans dotting an inner city alley, there is so much beauty, so much good in this world. My only regret is that it took so long to see it.
