LIfe? Don't talk to me about life.

I turned 35.

If I leave the house before 8.30am or get home after 6.30pm my little boy misses his dad, and my wife gives me hell about it.

If I work 12 hrs a day I can just about keep my company going, although I can't keep all my customers happy.

There aren't 12 hrs between 8.30am and 6.30pm.

I can live with my wife giving me hell, but I can't handle my little boy missing me.

We want the best for our kids and that means moving to a bigger house in a better school catchment area.

We make ends meet now but the mortgage on the new place is twice as high, as are many of the other associated bills.

To make more money the company has to do better which means it needs to grow, which means better performance and probably more of my time.

I struggle to say sober for 24 hrs and for the first time in 5 years I'm craving cigarettes.

BUT

My house didn't fall down around me when the earth shook.
My house didn't blow away or wash away in a typhoon.
No one I know contracted something nasty.

My point....

Is there a scale of stress and upset... and everything.... or are there many perspectives? (or is there just one perspective and many self important people who don't get it - myself included?)

One person worries about whether not buying that second bottle of Moet makes them look tight in front of their friends. Another person worries that the water they've carried from the river carries a disease that'll kill them. I worry my boy is upset at not seeing me cause i'm working. Someone else worries that their child's AK47 might jam whilst they're in a shoot out with other guerrillas...

We start. We survive. We are. We create more starts. We end.
What we do with the rest seems to be up to us.

There's nothing wrong with going through life focused on the mundane and trivial - but surely we should all be intelligent enough to recognise that's what we're doing when we're doing it?