SOUTHERN EXPOSURE: NEVER EXPECT PROBLEMS TO JUST GO AWAY

I was just thinking the other day about "simpler times."

Through selective recall and the erosion of memory by time, it seemed to me there were periods in my life when mornings weren't something I dreaded, work wasn't laborious and women weren't complicated.

Of course that's silly, women have always been complicated; it's just that their reasons for doing the things they do seemed to make more sense way back then -- or maybe I just didn't care. It's easy to brush aside complications when you're in single-minded pursuit of heaven.

I know things weren't always good back then because I received my most significant piece of advice on life when I was 19 or so -- I had to have some reason for getting it.

I was working at a bookstore in Clearwater, Fla., near my hometown. One day an old man came into the store. I noticed him because while I felt like my life at that time was in turmoil, he looked so calm and relaxed.

I asked him why he looked so composed, wasn't he feeling the same catastrophic pressure that everyone else was? Was it just as you got older things got easier? Did he have some secret to handling life?

He surprised me by saying his life was more complicated and difficult now than it was when he was my age. He'd just figured out a long time ago that there will always be problems.

He stopped fighting obstacles. He stopped looking past the current problems and watching for that time in his life when there wouldn't be any difficulties.

"You know you always say to yourself, 'If I can only get past this set of problems I'll have it easy for awhile,'" he said. "That isn't true, and I stopped telling myself that a long time back.

"There will always be problems that you'll have to deal with. The secret to life is to accept that, stop fighting it and try to be prepared to deal with the problems as they come up."

That helped a lot back then. It made sense, and it's true. I cannot think back to a single period of time when there wasn't some nagging problem to deal with. And I can't see a time in my life now where I can say, "If I just make it there I'll be on Easy Street."

Life is one problem after another, but it really shouldn't be any other way. What good is a warrior who has defeated all his enemies? What good is a hunter without the challenge of the prey? And let's face it, life isn't anything more than love, war and the hunt.

Don't believe me? What is work? War with competitors of some sort and the hunt for advancement and security. What is fun? The PURSUIT of happiness. Sports? That's obvious.

There are times when I'm better at this philosophy than others. There are some mornings when I just don't feel like slaying dragons, and it seems those mornings are beginning to pile up.

But it's time to throw off the covers, don the battle gear and get back into the mix. For most of us, myself included, it's a Don-Quixote-versus-the-windmills type of battle. But it's a fight just the same, and those windmills aren't going away on their own.

~David Angier is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.