Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

A friend of mine said recently, tongue in cheek, "If this whole 'doctor' thing doesn't work out for me, I have a backup plan: winning the lottery." Aside from completely cracking me up, he made a good point. Some things are so important to us that the only backup plan we can imagine is one that is utterly ridiculous. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, it makes complete sense from the standpoint that some things aren't like other things.

For my friend, becoming a doctor isn't like reaching into a bowel full of jelly

beans, finding none of your favorites, and taking another color instead. It's not like that at all. It's more like discovering a treasure that's more precious than anything else you might possess.

Sometimes we fumble about, searching in the wrong places, like a man seen crawling on the floor. When asked why, he said he'd lost his contact lens. When asked where he'd lost it, he replied, "Over there, but the light is better here." The truth is, some of us have to do precisely that before we start looking in the right places. You see, "X" doesn't always mark the spot and treasure maps are often unreliable.

Ironically, what we want the most may be staring us in the face and we just can't recognize it. We're conditioned to expect certain things by our upbringing, friends, or social status. Then one day, it's like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and we're as surprised as everyone else by what we've found and we wonder why it took us so long to see it. I realize I've touched on this theme in previous posts, so no, I don't have creeping memory loss. But some things are worth repeating occasionally, and my friend's commitment reminds me this is one of them.


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