A point of View © 1996
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA
Experience has taught me that in order to be successful in life we must need good memories. Old age has reinforced that requirement as many friends have left us forever and we must resort to the recollections of the good times we shared with them in order to accept their losses.
But life is not only about memories gone; it is actually about expectations coming, what some would call the future. I’ve had my share of those starting in my early years.
First were my dreams of adulthood while I was only a child, then an insecure adolescent, later a hyperbolic teenager. I was always enjoying the present phase, but looking forward with expectations to the next. I was sure that I would be gaining something in the process: maturity, knowledge, popularity, perhaps wealth.
As I eventually crossed those markers in my young life, my dreams of finding a good and stable career, someone I would love all my life and eventually a family, dominated my expectations. Luckily, I was able to step all those echelons as I climbed to maturity while trying to survive an exile I’d never expected, a change of language and culture that was the price I had to pay, and finally a reorientation of my faith.
When I arrived to the United States I wanted to continue my career in banking. I was able to do so for the next thirty four years labeled with one or other impressive sounding official title. They were remarkable to most people who were mostly unfamiliar with what they really meant day in and day out, but not to me searching one more impressive ambition.
After the water in that well ran out, my next drink was another expectation: become a full time college professor. It wasn’t hard to land it when I reached another required expectation, a doctoral degree. It was actually not difficult to change the desk in a banking office for a podium at a prestigious university. It had been a dream and one tries to excel in reaching them. Of course, seeing so many books written and published by others laying around, tempted me to write and publish my own until the count more than exceeded the number of fingers and toes in my limbs.
Now, as we lock ourselves in a room and avoid a world threatened by an enemy we didn’t expect, see or don’t even know when it attacks, I notice that my expectations have taken a turn for… the unexpected. Do you remember the last time you crossed the street to avoid a suspicious character approaching you on the sidewalk? Well, that was only practicing for the real McCoy. The real McCoy has arrived.
I worry about the next time my grocer will be able to deliver my food needs and whether they even have them. And when the shoppers arrive, I wonder how the face of that shopper, covered with a mask that reminds me of Zorro, looks like. I have to rely on the sound of their laughter, not the view of a smiling face. The Internet has become my frequent correspondent and I have to wait for a box that contains disinfectants or perhaps candy, not sure which. It is a new bingo game.
All my previous expectations have dissolved and turned into a reality hard to imagine when I started hoping many years ago. My father used to tell me that life was always a battle. What he didn’t tell me was that I would have to hassle in a supermarket aisle with an unknown who tried to get a six-roll pack of toilet paper from my shopping cart. That was never in my expectations. Do I hear the sound of a virus laughing?
And that is my point of view today.
