Richard Bolles - What Color Is Your Parachute?

It turned out that those who healed faster believed that everything that happened to them had meaning, even if they didn’t know what the meaning was, at the time. They believed that nothing meaningless ever happened to them. The ones who healed slowly did not believe this. This was independent of whether they believed in God or not.

The reason this talk made such an impression on me was because it demonstrated that what we are thinking actually can influence the body. It seemed to follow that it could influence our minds and spirits also.

I was also struck by a part of his report that said, “…even if they didn’t know what the meaning was.” Apparently, just to believe that nothing about our life is meaningless is a powerful idea.

So, here we have it:

Third Important Attitude for Survival While Out of Work: We need to assume that nothing that happens to us is just senseless and meaningless, including being out of work for a long time. In the context of our total life, it will eventually turn out to have meaning, even if that meaning is the forging of our soul to make it stronger and more compassionate toward the needs of others worse off than we are.

Interesting! In whatever circumstances we may find ourselves in life, attitude is everything. When we are out of work, we must never shrink from doing the hard work of rethinking our whole strategy .

Certainly, after observing the job-hunting and career-changing scene for forty years, I am convinced that those who feel that no period in their life is meaningless, have a definite advantage over other job-hunters or career-changers. And a by-product of that attitude is that they do not despair. For those who do despair, and feel depressed, I refer you to Appendix B at the back of this manual, for some suggestions of fourteen things you can do about that .

But what do we mean when anyone says, “This time in my life has meaning, but I don’t know what that meaning is, right now.” Why don’t we know it right now?

I think one reason may be that the period of time we are talking about, is only Act I in a two-act play. One time when I had been fired without warning, I had an appointment that very afternoon with my dentist. He was an old man and upon hearing my news, he waved his finger at me, and said, “You won’t believe a word of what I’m saying right now, but this will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. I’ve seen it happen too many times to doubt it.”

Well, he was right; it led eventually to my writing this book to try to help a bunch of really desperate people; and that changed my whole life.

The first Act, being fired, seemed meaningless to me, until the second Act, the writing of this book, came along to give the first Act meaning.

So, if this long time of unemployment seems pointless and meaningless to you, you would do well to wait for the second Act that follows, whatever that may turn out to be, to find out what the meaning of this first Act was.

I do think we can hurry that up, sometimes . We can give meaning to this period of unemployment now, rather than just waiting for that meaning to unfold by itself somewhere further down the road. There are ways we can define, at least to ourselves, what the meaning of this period of unemployment is, now .

One way to get at that definition is to ask ourselves, “What is this time for?”

Say we are out of work. Say it’s been twenty months. Naturally, we are tempted to answer that question as, “This time is for finding work.” And since we haven’t (so far), then this whole time of unemployment seems dangerously close to meaningless.

But suppose we come up with a different answer to the question “What is this time for?” That could give these twenty months meaning, right here and now.

Different answers? What kind of different answers? Well, I think there are five. Here they are, in order:

1. “These months have meaning because I am making this a Time for Thinking.”

This time is our chance to rethink our whole philosophy about what is important to us, in life, and what is not. We have time to think through, and write out, what we think about all the elements in a Philosophy of life . You can choose from:

Beauty:which beauty stirs us, what its function is in the world

Behavior:how we should behave in this world

Beliefs:what our strongest beliefs are

Celebration:how we like to play or celebrate, in life

Choice:what its nature and importance is

Community:what our concept is about belonging to each other; what we think our responsibility is to each other

Compassion:what we think about its importance and use

Confusion:how we live with it, and deal with it

Death:what we think about it and what we think happens after it

Events:what we think makes things happen, how we explain why they happen

Free will:whether we are “predetermined” or have free will

God:see Supreme Being

Happiness:what makes for the truest human happiness

Heroes and heroines:who ours are, and why

Human:what we think is important about being human, what we think is our function

Love:what we think about its nature and importance, along with all its related words: compassion, forgiveness, grace

Moral issues:which we believe are the most important for us to pay attention to, wrestle with, help solve

Paradox:what our attitude is toward its presence in life

Purpose:why we are here, what life is all about

Reality:what we think is its nature, and components

Self:deciding whether physical self is the limit of your being, deciding what trust in self means

Spirituality:what its place is in human life, how we should treat it

Stewardship:what we should do with life’s gifts to us

Supreme Being:our concept of, or what we think holds the universe together

Truth:what we think about it, which truths are most important

Uniqueness:what we think makes each of us unique

Values:what we think about ourselves, what we think about the world, prioritized as to what matters most (to us)

2. “These months have meaning because I am making this a Time for Learning.”

There must be something you’ve always wanted to learn more about, but never could seem to find the time. Well, now you have the time. Not a clue as to what you want to learn about? Then start with a fantasy game, to flex your mental muscles. Imagine, if you will, a Dream School: you can study anything, your teacher can be anyone, and the place can be anywhere. So, in this fantasy, what do you want to learn?

Here is an example or two:

Make a complete list of anything that comes to mind—the wilder the better. Then go back and see if any subject popped up that you would seriously like to learn more about.

You have a rich library on the Internet of free videos on almost any subject you can think of. Here is a sampler: