Not At All or All At Once

This was not apparent before I started working from home after the pandemic, but since the pandemic hit I have been feeling like on some days the world stops; as if nothing exists outside the room I am in. Nobody gives me any new assignments at work, no clients call to check on the project, not even any of my friends or family reach out. The e-mail service or the internet are not down, but they might as well be since nothing comes through them anyway. On such days, I find myself waiting for something to happen in vain. Nothing happens until the end of the day and I while away the day waiting for something to happen. However, on other days, everything piles up one after the other. I get assignment after assignment at work, clients constantly call to check, doctors call to tell me that I have an upcoming appointment during the day, I even receive multiple invitations from friends or family to hang out. These all come in the blink of an eye and try to squeeze themselves in just one day, making it impossible for me to tackle them all at once in the course of just one day. I was complaining because I had nothing to do a day ago, but now I complain because I find myself overloaded with responsibilities. If even just one or two of these responsibilities came the day before, I could have handled them all, but they all chose to come the same day, leaving me paralyzed. I call this “the Rule of Not At All or All At Once”. I tried to explain the rule using the span of a day, but it also applies to longer periods of time. I have had such periods where I felt alone in the world, just as I felt like everybody in the world wanted a piece from me for weeks on end.

This is like a divine joke. The forces above look down on how my day(s) is(are) going and say “This one has not been doing much lately, he is having a relatively easy time. Let’s mix things up for him.” or “There has been a mistake. This one did not receive the responsibilities they needed to yesterday, so we are sending it all today. We do not care if this overwhelms him.” and then, poof! Out of seemingly nowhere, my day shakes from the ground up. For example, I recently changed jobs and was left without a job for a period of time. I constantly searched for a job while unemployed, asked my friends and family, and applied to jobs I found here and there, but I did not even receive any messages from the companies I applied to; until I found my current job. I applied to more than 50 jobs but none responded to my applications and just when I was starting to despair, a company reached out to offer me an interview. There was still no activity from the other 49 jobs during the interview process, but when the offer came (which I accepted promptly) from that one company, I started getting calls and messages. Some were from my friends offering to give my resume to a company they were familiar with, and one was a direct call from an employer who wanted to hire me as the head of a new division they were founding. Unfortunately, since I had already accepted the other job, I had to refuse them all. If they had arrived even a few days earlier, I might have had the opportunity to pick and choose the best course of action for myself, but there was nothing at all for a long while, just to come all at once when I had already made my choice.  

This gets me thinking about what would happen if I did not accept the job offer that I saw to be my last chance. Would I still receive the same calls and messages offering me other opportunities, or would they not have come at all since I did not accept the job I saw as my last chance? Was I impatient? Should I have waited more and risked getting pushed away from the business world and the possibility of making money? There is no way for me to find out since I accepted the job, but at the time I feared the Rule. I was afraid that if I did not accept it I would remain in the state of “Nothing At All”, but accepting the job put me in the state of “All At Once”, so everything started piling up one after the other.

They say “Good things come to those who wait.”, but nothing came out of my waiting for something to happen when I was looking for a job. Sure, I applied to jobs, but I sat idle after I finished my applications. I did not follow up because I did not know how to follow up, and I did not try to learn how to follow up, I just waited. I accepted being in the state of “Nothing At All” instead of forcing myself into the state of “All At Once”. Therefore, if the job I ended up accepting did not present itself, I would forever be stuck in the state of “Nothing At All”. This makes me feel like the saying “Good things come to those who wait.” and as it turns out this is not the full saying. It is “Good things come to those who wait but only the things left by those who hustle.” Maybe, in the times before the Hustle Culture, good things might have come my way when I waited, but nowadays there are billions of people in the world and some of them are willing to constantly hustle to keep themselves in the state of “All At Once” even if I was not. Hence, it seems like I too have to force myself to stay within the state of “All At Once” instead of waiting to be pushed back into the state of “Not At All”.