Have you noticed that when you misplace something and you turn the entire house upside down searching for it, you won’t find it?
Then just when you’ve already forgotten about it, or worse, you’ve already bought a replacement, you suddenly stumble across it.
Happens to me all the time, that’s why I’ve learned to stop looking for something when I am in a desperate mode, knowing that all my effort won’t do me any good.
And sure enough, just when I’ve given up, I come across that missing thing when I’m busy doing something else, without so much effort on my part.
This is also applicable to love, as the cliche goes. Whenever I sigh and complain about not yet finding my soulmate, the person I am talking to would always say the same thing: “you don’t look for love, it finds you.”
There are variations, of course, like that “love is like a butterfly” version that keeps getting circulated as forwarded text messages.
But the point is, they all point out that the more desperately I look for love, the more it will elude me, and that when I just go about my business as usual and not devot so much thought and energy into it, it will show up when I least expect it.
Nothing new there, really. But what is a new realization for me us that in my life, the whole “never finding it when you’re desperately searching for it” bit not only applies to missing objects and love, but also to jobs.
During those times that I scattered resumes all over the place, I did not get a single call. But when I applied on a whim when something came up, without desperately pursuing it, without putting much thought to what I just did because I didn’t need to have that job, that’s the time that I got the job quickly.
I have worked for five companies since I graduated, and four of these hired me within two weeks of my application. The only one job I was desperate for, I went though 5 months of mental anguish before I actually got the job. Then I stayed for only three months, a much shorter time spent on pursuing something that turned out to be so not worth it than actually having it.
I realize this now, because I am desperate to leave the country. So desperate that I’ve sent off resumes to who knows how many companies over the internet, without getting even a single response for all my effort.
Sigh. I give up. Maybe the right approach to this is to learn to love my present job and get so caught up in it that I forget that I was desperate to leave it in the first place. And then, just when I’m least expecting it, my cellphone will ring… a foreign number. I pick up… a foreign accent on the other end. “When are you available for a job interview?”
Oh how I wish.