The Sitcom of Life

It’s not often that I update my blog at this hour of the night, but I’ve been thinking a lot today. You see the last couple of weeks I’ve been under a lot of stress, and when I’m stressed the most helpful thing I find is spending time watching old Episodes of sappy TV shows, like teen soaps (particularly, 90210). The theme all these shows have in common is the concept of “life is good”. We watch these characters go through these horrible experiences, and yet everything turns out ok in the end.

We all know that’s not life…but sometimes, maybe it is. Tonight after a dreadfully dead night at work, I left feeling very stressed. When it comes to stress, one thing will kick it off, and then everything else just follows, and by the end of it all I feel like is a looser who has nothing going for him. I think it’s the Portuguese in me. I went out after work for one drink with the boss. During which time I saw some amazing things.

I saw an old friend, who has moved away and came home for a week to visit, and we shared in a few old memories, which yielded laughter, a lot of laughter. I re-connected, though briefly, with a friend who hasn’t moved but I haven’t seen in a while. And I saw two people who I know who used to be quite close, who were re-connecting for the first time in a long while. In addition to all these wonderful things, I managed to have a Priestly experience, yes even at 12:30 in the morning, while I was minding my own business heading home.

You see the bottom line sometimes in life is that when we are in the pits, we have to open our eyes to the world around us. Sometimes it’s hard to see life outside of the bubble we live in, until we peer into someone else’s bubble. Maybe that’s why teen soaps are such a success…because we get to peer into other people’s lives, who we have come to know quite well, and see how their drama ends in happiness. We know that’s not the hand of cards that life deals us, but it gives us a glisten of hope while we are watching them.

If we judge our lives on the day to day experiences that we go through, we are doomed to end our days in darkness. If we only evaluate our successes and failures in light of the situation we currently find ourselves in, we will inevitably find ourselves depressed, and alone. If however, we look at our lives in light of the bigger picture, the successes and failures of years before, and really step out of our bubble, and look at the full picture, we may realize that life isn’t all that bad.

The old saying really is true, “If you spend your whole life with one foot in the past, and one foot in the future, you are shi**ing on the present.” Truer words were never spoken. Let’s not waste the present. Let’s step out of our private bubbles, where we have found such comfort in being miserable and depressed, and look at the bigger picture. Let’s watch the whole Season, before we judge one character on the “Sitcom of Life”, because life really is a Sitcom, or a Soap Opera. Characters come and go, old friends make guest appearances in key episodes, and sometimes, in those Series Finales, all the pieces fall into place, and sometimes the way those pieces fit together, remains a mystery. . . That’s what happens when God is the Screen-writer.