Whiskey and the Lie of Life Lessons

We go through things in our lives, sometimes horrible things.  Then we sit down afterward and drink, sometimes horrible drinks.  Like Wall Street Whiskey.  I love whiskey and coke, and Wall Street is only $6.99 a bottle and it comes in a glass bottle so I don't feel like an urban outdoors man with an unbreakable bottle playing hide and go seek from a paper bag.  And it has a bad ass name like Wall Street Whiskey, which when you are a licensed financial jerk makes you feel something.    But it tastes like spoiled gasoline.  It burns, and coke doesn't help much, but it does the job of helping you start to unpack the horrible things that have happened.

So we sit and drink (or if we are really lucky we commiserate with somebody else who isn't chased away by the spoiled 85 octane) and start to dig out the bad things.  

Like the time our business partner left.  She came in and emptied out the business while we had all of our customers there.  She took all the clothes from our store and the seats from our lobby.  She took everything she could carry out while people just looked on.  After she left, and we closed up for the evening, my wife sat in the only seat left in our office and I sat on the desk and we cried.  We cried and then we stopped.  We decided that night that we were either going to close the business the next morning or go forward even stronger.

Three years later we shut the doors of that business on our own accord.  They were the most painful three years of my life.  We worked ourselves into the ground.  We had our first daughter and I don't remember much of the first two years of her life.  I drank heavily, hid in every dark hole I could find to hide and worked.

Afterward I talked about all the lessons I learned from that business partner.  All the lessons I learned from that business, from those lost years.  But the truth is those years were lost.  The pain was intense and if we had continued we would have divorced.  But we didn't continue, we quit, finally.  And quitting was good, but what happened was not good.  The lessons learned are often justification to continue doing things that we probably shouldn't be doing.

I don't want to continue learning lessons from pain, to keep putting lipstick on that pig.  I want to learn because I'm trying to learn, because I'm getting better not because bad things are happening to me.  I want to stop bad things from happening, not learn from them.

Sometimes things are just bad, and we should cry, and the next morning we should shut it down.  It's ok to quit today, you don't need to keep learning, just let yourself be ok.