The Cost of Opportunity, The Terrible Risk of Stealing Your Own Hopes

Occasionally I dream of winning the lottery. When the jackpot gets big I plunk down one or two dollars on a ticket, and I think the main reason I do, the main thing I'm buying, is the opportunity to dream for a day or two, to muse and wonder on the life that might be. The dreams are both distracting and instructive, a mental vacation, a seminar on what you really want.

What I dream of is not fabulous riches and an oversized house and fancy cars, although those pass throught the picture. The chief appeal is time. A lottery winner, or at least the lottery winner I become in my head, is with one oversized check given back the precious store of 24 hours in every day for the rest of his life. Life suddenly is no longer dominated by drudgery and petty obligation.

I wouldn't have to put on the headset and get abused and bombarded by people's petty troubles, the litany of their enormous irritation at having to press two buttons instead of one, their outrage at missing Dancing With the Stars. I like a little TV as much as the next guy, but I can't help but thinking they'd be better off dancing with their wives, or gazing at the stars, or reaching for them, rather than being nasty and rude to me because I had the misfortune of being on the other end of the line when the dreaded beep sounded, the tone that haunts the dreamless space between closing my eyes and losing consciousness.

I get frantic, my fists clench for a second, if I think about that beep and the control it holds over my life. It is an audible lash of slavery. I wear a headset but I might as well be chained to the desk. For forty precious hours a week I'm in a misery of triviality and whiny indignation, over what? The right to stuff your minds with nothing and line the pockets of the stockholders of the Global Communications Giant with ill-gotten cash. There is no way the monthly cable phone and internet bill should be $300, for anyone, but for hundreds of thousands of people it is. There is no way Ray Ramano should make twenty million a year for telling jokes, but he does. We're that desperate to be distracted.

There's an opportunity cost to everything we choose to do. There are fishermen who are poets, but even they must realize the more time they spend tying flies, the less fish they'll catch and the more poems will pop into their heads, but the fewer hours they'll spend writing them down. The dream of winning the lottery isn't wallowing in the pile of money; it's wallowing in the priceless luxury of having enough time to take care of the body and mind, to sleep until you're ready to be awake and exercise until the body is rejuvenated and read until the mind is inspired, to be free of punching the clock, to live the Johnny Paycheck classic, "Take this job and shove it, I ain't workin' here no more."

I live in dread of being discovered for the malcontent I am. It takes an enormous energy to hold in check my growing discontent. My wanderlust is at war with my sense of responsibility. I need to earn a living. Everyone does. But why does it have to make us so miserable? Why do I have to average 10.85 calls per hour and achieve 2% new product sales and maintain a CQE rating of 94 while keeping the occurences below 5.0 a year? I'm supposed to care about the customers. Deep down I'm a fundamentally courteous person, so I do. But who cares about me? How do I escape the dread I feel climbing those stairs to the third floor? When I get to the top of them I've only climbed high enough to reach another round of emailed memos and motivational pep talks, of glitches and fixes and oppressive reminders and error codes and points to remember.

The biggest part of the problem of me is not the working hours, it's the time that's left to me. No matter how rich or poor we are, we have the same store of 24 hours, and we can spend it sleeping or dreaming or stuffing our faces. I can play poker or go to the gym or take a nap. I can read the Duck blog or research a new novel. Most of the time I don't do much of anything, and the years mount while I fall asleep. I have a lottery ticket in my wallet but I don't want to check the numbers yet. I'd like to keep the dream alive for another day.

There's a new movie out which I've heard about but haven't seen called Food, Inc., about the dangers of our highly processed and manufactured food supply, the ways it is literally making us sick. The movie has an agenda and a pronounced political viewpoint, and I'm not sure if it's still in theaters or available now for rental or on DVD. Draw your own conclusions about its content, but it illustrates an essential principle at the heart of our lives:

We become what we think about, we are what we take in, the inevitable product of our lives is the habits we practice and the choices we make, whether they are made consciously or not. No matter where we are, we didn't get there by accident, and nothing changes until we change our thinking.

That's the exciting part. I could wake up tomorrow and find I won the lottery. Or I could wake up this afternoon and make a choice that unravels all the rest of them, that sets in motion the life and the hopes I really want to realize. I need to find the courage within myself to live my passion. I need to find the courage to be truly passionate. Somewhere in all of us is the power to discard our complacency and lazy assumption, to consider the cost of what we're doing and failing to do. We have to stop stealing our own hopes. We have to discover what we knew all along.

In Remember the Titans, Coach Boone is blowing his whistle while the neat rows of players in their practice whites are doing up-downs in the summer heat. "We're going to change the way we eat, We're going to change the way we block." He's a fierce taskmaster. Every detail will be right. Every choice will be for a purpose. The Titans will play with one heart and for one goal. The Titans went undefeated. They left everything on the field. They didn't let racism or ignorance stand in their way. Every one of them accomplished more than they thought they could. They changed the way they ate. They made a future greater than anyone forecast for them. They are remembered, and their story still inspires greatness.