Missed opportunities

Being an opportunist is not necessarily a good thing. Seizing upon a situation for personal advantage, but at someone else’s expense, may be good worldly wisdom, but it’s surely not God’s way.

Circumstances and things do come along, however, which are genuine opportunities and truly are blessings from God. We can pursue these things with enthusiasm and dedication knowing that here is our chance to succeed, indeed to excel.

There have been times like these in my life; and times, too, when out of laziness and ignorance and pride, out of immaturity and weakness and stupidity, I’ve blown it. I’ve messed up. I’ve turned fabulous opportunity into empty failure.

These ghosts of the past rear their ugly heads from time to time. If you’ve had the experience, you know what I mean when I talk about the guilt, the remorse, the anger, the unrequited anxiety. These are the missed opportunities.

Sometimes these experiences are big. Real big. Life changing big. At least one skeleton in my closet represents a missed opportunity that could have made a vast difference in my life, both from the perspective of personal satisfaction and probably financially. Not me, though. No. I was more interested in partying than in making the necessary commitment to a career in law. I wanted to boogie!

Suffice it to say that my decision to drop out of law school has flooded my late night consciousness more than a few times in the intervening years. My sarcasm belies my anger at myself and even a sense of shame and embarrassment. Too late now. The feelings can be unlovely. If you’ve ever blown it big, you know what I mean.

At other times my missed opportunities are on a smaller scale. The other night one of my young ones came into the living room wanting to show me some school papers. I was in a sour mood. I had lost something and was mad because I couldn’t find it. When the school papers were presented I said tersely, I don’t want to look at these now. Get them out of my way. Put them on the table over there and leave me alone. Have you seen my …?

The next morning I saw the stack of papers where my child had left them. He was now in school. When I saw the papers I felt empty and sad. I had been hell-bent on being boorish and bearish and I had accomplished that handily, but I had missed the opportunity to share a peaceful and joyful and pleasant moment with a child. Such life-giving pauses can never be recovered. There’s never really any such thing as making up for it at another time.

Each of us has an emblem or two from the past that represents what would have been, what could have been. All of us have missed the opportunities, great and small. For me, it seems the distinction is beginning to blur.

I have trashed whole giant opportunities in my life. Somehow those big circumstances, however, leave me wanting to kick myself no more than the smaller things that come along: the blown opportunity to say a kind word; the lazy excuse for failing to visit a sickbed; the angry preoccupation preventing a session of patient listening.

The older I get, the more I have come to believe that there can be great power in a single moment. Sometimes, eternity may be hidden in waiting 30 seconds more.

One might say it was nothing that I didn’t take a minute and look at my son’s papers, especially compared to those great rewards I could have had in a legal profession. We’ll never know. That minute with my son could have changed his life, and mine. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 31st, 1987