There was a person who told me, “Man is only as strong as his weakest link.” The reason I was offered this opinion is something for another time. However, where I am now and who I am as opposed to the person I was before is different. My eagerness to become strong is based from a different intention. Then again, I used to view strength very differently. I used to think strength was the person who walked into a gym and racked the machines or bench-pressed more than anyone else. I used to think strength was as simple as the weight a person could carry, which it is. Strength is the amount of weight a person can carry. 

I am a member of this machine that we call the working world. Of course, I am far from alone in this machine. None of us are. We work alongside millions of others and together, we are all the integral moving parts of an economic system that helps make the world go around. In fact, everyone is a part of this system, including the unemployed because somehow, the world has to function. Trains have to move. Planes have to fly. People need to eat and of course, investors have to be happy.

The truth is everything costs money. Food certainly costs money. Gas costs money. As it is, prices are going up across the board, yet we are finding ourselves at the corner of a new financial turn. We can’t go on like this forever. Remote learning cannot continue to damage the socialization of young students whose early interactions are necessary for their social education.

There was a professional coach I met who admittedly, was older and more experienced. He had more formal training and a higher level of education than myself. Our backgrounds were different and so was our experience. He was a big finance guy and I had been working in the blue collar section for a long time.

Our lives were different in more ways than one. We were generationally different. We were economically different. However, the one similarity that brought us together was that we both wanted to improve ourselves on both a personal and professional level.

I go back to the ideas we grew up with like things such as “Mom always knows best.” I go back to the ideas of the lessons we learned and think about the times when our parents would tell us what to do. I think about what parents say and how they preach about the way things were at their age. I think about this and how, of course, they were young once too.
I think about the way we look at our parents and how it is hard to consider them as humans who went through their teenage years. To us, they are a separate entity. Parents are not like other people.

I think about the ideas of when grownups tell kids, “You’re just a kid. You’ll understand when you’re older,” which may be true. At least, in some cases.
Then I think about the struggles of anxiety. I think about performance based disorders. I think about the separation and the isolated feelings that come with depression. And naturally, I think about the advice we receive from people and how they want to help, but yet, there is a difference. There is a degree of separation.  

Over the years, I have spent hours on long conversations with people in confusion, drunk, dazed, or halfway through a nod that left them almost dead. In some cases, death was inevitable. In other cases, changes occurred. I have listened to people talk at great lengths about their desire to change and yet, their changes were never met. I have met with people who lost everything. They lost wives, husbands, houses and family. I have met with  people who were unemployed and who, by their own standards, had nothing going for them and nothing to look forward to or live for. And yet, when offered a branch or offered help, they refused.