September 27, 2005

• Unfinished Business
  An essay by Michael F. Nyiri
  09/23/05 9:56 p.m. pdt

  
  

  There is a dream I have frequently which I call “The Retail Dream”. In it, I, or some alter ego in the dream who represents me, is employed by a retail establishment, and is responsible for some endcap display, or promotion, or the setup of a new department. Throughout the course of the dream, I am meeting with superiors, quarreling about a timeframe, or trying to finish some impossible task. At the termination of the dream, when I awake, the task is never complete, and in some future dream, another Retail establishment, another task, another presentation will never be finished either.
  This dream is sometimes what I call a “chapter dream” where I get up, go to the bathroom, and then “return” to the very same dream when I go back to sleep. Each “retail establishment” is different, and sometimes elements of my present job as an electrical systems designer are scattered throughout the dream. Prior to the “Retail Dream” I used to have the “School Dream” in which I was in class somewhere, and an assignment was due, but I never turned it in, and didn’t get the grade credit for the class.
  In real life, I never finished school. I had to drop out of college because of my parents’ deaths, with less than 16 units needed for graduation. My first career was in retail, and I never became a store manager, my career goal, because each place of business in which I was in the manager pool went out of business eventually.
  So the “School Dream” and the “Retail Dream” are basically the “same dream”, the dream of incompleteness, of “unfinished business.” These dreams elaborate what has gone on in reality. The describe in small details in compressed time the dissapointments harbored in the real world regarding the facts that I never finished school and I never reached my goals in retail.
  Are these regrets? Hardly. Or I never think of them as regrets. I was studying to be a high school English teacher in college, and all my friends who were already in education at the time, with few exceptions, weren’t making the money I made in retail management, so my decision, forced by the hand of my parents’ deaths at the time, in the early 70s, to “drop out” of school and concentrate on my retail career, was a sound one. There is nothing I could do about chain stores going out of business. I stayed with one through the closing down, and received a hefty severance package which allowed me to stay unemployed for nearly three months, and I was able to treat these three months as an extended vacation. However, I’m a bit “anal retentive” when it comes to my dealings with life, and I always like to have everything “tied up neatly”, with “everything in it’s place”, so obviously, deep in my subconscious, this feeling of “unfinished business” does bother me deeply.
  I think we all have “unfinished business.” We all harbor some kind of regret that we are not “done with something” even though we might, like me, know what that “something” is, or might never know.
  Recently, I was watching an old television show, in which the guest star was dying slowly of a cancerous disease. He told the main character in the show that if they had a chance of “dying quick” and “dying slow” to choose “quick” because when you know you are going to die, all you can think about are the things you have not accomplished. A lot of people make “lists” of “things to do before they die”. The funny thing is, we all know we are going to die. We just don’t know when. So we should always be prepared that this day might be our last, and we should always be “living in the now” and not worrying ourselves silly over the things we will never accomplish.
  In my present career, I perform four distinct “tasks”. I “quote” jobs to customers who “request a quote.” I design and specify the components for the panels on order. I create the set of “master documents” which allows the technicians to build the panels. And I run the final electrical tests prior to shipping. Thus, I sort of “babysit” the panel through the complete process. When we are busy, like we are now, this can be quite a lot of work. On my whiteboard at work, each Monday, I update the list of what still needs to be done. At close of work today, I had 3 unfinished quotes, two orders which need component corroboration prior to work order generation, eight unfinished document packages in various degrees of completion, and 1 panel on the test desk. You can see, that this “list” will never be finished, and of course the company doesn’t want it to be, because in a production facility, the more backlog you have, the better it is on the bottom line. No work, nothing for the technicians to build, and the company ceases to exist.
  My nature, however, dictates that I have to always be “on top of” this list of “things to do”. Other tasks might jump into the middle of the list, and become “expedited priorities.” This tends to slow down the progress of the other jobs. The whole job is an intricate dance of details, and can come crashing down with ease. I used to worry so much about what I hadn’t gotten done yet that I would work 12 hours a day and come in on weekends. Experience and the wisdom which comes with age have stopped me from working unpaid overtime because I know “everything gets done in time.”
  Recently, we have seen the nation hit with some great disasters, and we hear about the “clean up” taking years or even decades. We hear and read about hundreds of things that are “on the horizon” in science and industry. Healthcare, while an economic mess, always comes up with better methods of taking care of us, and sometimes I wonder if there will be a “cure for” many ills “before I die”.
  Nothing will ever be “finished.” Nothing is ever “done.” That is the cyclical nature of life. I can now look at my whiteboard and I concentrate on the “crossouts”, those tasks that are, indeed, “finished”. I do this instead of concentrating on what has yet to be done.
  I look at my life, which might be “half over” and instead of trying to commisserate over those things I never did, I try to relish the things that are currently happening, and bask in the glory of what I have accomplished.
  It isn’t easy. The sense of “unfinished business” always rears it’s ugly head, especially while asleep, and embroiled in “The Retail Dream”. But I always awake from the dream, so far , at least, and there is always something more to be done.
  Our lives and times never seem to be “finished” until that time we are finally laid to rest six feet underground.
  Will we finally rest, and be able to have a sense of completeness then?
  Or does the cycle start all over again?
  The answer, while we are cognizant, and before this happens, is not to worry, but to immerse ourselves in our task at hand, enjoy the accomplishment rather than the “unfinished business” on the horizon, and to go to bed each night and have a good rest, and if the “Retail Dream” occurs, to treat it as a dream, and not worry about any misconceived consequences it might be trying to tell us. Then get up, refreshed, and start the crazy cycle of living all over again.

  • 1:39 am
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