Everything you want & need is up to you to make it happen

“Everything you want and need is up to you to make it happen”

Oh God what a thing to start Now!vember with! Fundamentally I don’t think that this is true – I think it’s an Americanism. The honest truth is that you can never have everthing you ‘want’ and no matter how many lotto tickets you buy, the chances are you will never win the big one. In fact, if I accept this statement as an ‘Americanism’ I can look at what it means and how that translates into our culture and belief system.

This statement says that you can have everything that you want (and need) if you do ‘something’ to make it happen. Now, on the positive side it’s a call to action; an anti-apathy statement if you will. It is saying that if you get out there and do the hard work, the rewards will come to you. And in many cases this true – if you want to be a Doctor, you need to get out there do the hard yards with your study (and lets face it be naturally smart enough) and you will become a Doctor.

But there are two flip sides – one is that this statement is a ‘Me’ statement – another good ol’ American – I am the most important person in the world and I deserve to get everything that I want – statement. It encourages a level of entitlement. A person would believe that they are entitled to everything that they want because they have done something to make ‘it’ happen. I have to say people, this is what is wrong with the Y generation – this huge sense of entitlement. Somehow they are owed everything and feel that they are entitled to promotion, to excitement, to leadership. Although, perhaps enough of them do NOT put in enough of the work now I think about it.

The other negative side is that no matter what you do, how hard you work, and what opportunities you look for, you cannot have everything that you want. Imagine if you were 39 years old with a 5 year old and you have terminal cancer in your brain. They cannot cure you. They cannot cut out all the tumours festering in your head. You can take a million different drugs that make you fat, sleepless or that make you vomit 18 hours a day. You can do everything possible in the world but the thing you want - to be cured – is never going to happen.

Here are the things that I want:

• A four bedroom beach house in Coogee – its never going to happen; seriously I could save every dollar that I earned, I could invest in lotto or I could ask my husband to fall in front of a bus so I could claim his life insurance policy – but I would still never have enough for a flash beach pad in Sydney

• A much bigger house than the shoebox-in-middle-o-road that I live in now – this could happen actually, but I don’t know if I am willing to spend a year eating rice and beans just so we can afford to build it|

• My bestie to NOT have terminal cancer in her brain so that we can grow old together and continue to laugh at the idiotic things our kids do and say and to drink margaritas in the summer time for the next 40 years. I want this more than the beach pad and a large house but I am never going to get this one. Instead I will, one day far too soon, be pouring my own margaritas and writing things down so that I can remind her 5 year old of who her mother was, what she wanted for her daughter and trying to help her grow up to be the person her mother always wanted her to be

And you know what, there is nothing Oprah, Dr Phil or Anthony Robbins can ever say or do that will fix my friend. To be honest I am better off going to Lisa Williams or John Edwards once she has gone and asking for them to ask her if I am doing it right and if there is anything that I have forgotten to tell George.

Sigh, an angry pants start to my Now!vember challenge. Well, it is Monday morning….