What Color Is Your Parachute?

You need to attend to your health, but you do not need to constantly worry about it. You need to meditate on your death, but you do not need to be constantly preoccupied with it. To paraphrase the glorious words of G. K. Chesterton: “We now have a strong desire for living combined with a strange carelessness about dying. We desire life like water and yet are ready to drink death like wine.” We know that we are here to do what we came to do, and we need not worry about anything else.

Comment 7: Using Internet Resources

There is a website that deals with news, etc., about all faiths, which you may want to look at: www.beliefnet.com.

Then there is a Jesuit site that leads you in a daily meditation for ten or more minutes (in more than twenty languages with a visual, but otherwise no sound or distraction): http://sacredspace.ie.

There is also a site that gives you a daily podcast of church bells, music, Scripture reading, and meditations or homily, with no visuals, but with sound, and an audio MP3 file that can be sent to your phone, computer, PDA, etc: www.pray-as-you-go.org.

There is a site dedicated to helping you keep a divine consciousness 24/7: by helping you link up to other people of faith, through prayer circles, sharing of personal stories of faith, etc., aimed especially, but not exclusively, toward young adults. Its ultimate message: you are not alone: www.24-7prayer.com/communities.

Lastly, there is a site dedicated to helping you find a spiritual counselor (or “spiritual director”), as well as retreat centers, in the Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish, or Interfaith faiths: www.sdiworld.org.

FINAL COMMENT

A Job-Hunt Done Well

If you approach your job-hunt as an opportunity to work on this issue as well as the issue of how you will keep body and soul together, then hopefully your job-hunt will end with your being able to say: “Life has deep meaning to me, now. I have discovered more than my ideal job; I have found my Mission, and the reason why I am here on Earth.”

Appendix B. A Guide to Dealing with Unemployment Depression

UNEMPLOYMENT DEPRESSION

Unemployment can take a terrible toll upon the human spirit. In a recent study of over 6,000 job-hunters, interviewed every week for up to 24 weeks, it was discovered

“that many workers become discouraged the longer they are unemployed. In particular, the unemployed express feeling more sad the longer they are unemployed, and sadness rises more quickly with unemployment duration during episodes of job search. In addition, reported life satisfaction is lower for the same individual following days in which comparatively more time was devoted to job search…. These findings suggest that the psychological cost of job search rises the longer someone is unemployed…. One reason why job search assistance may have been found to consistently speed individuals’ return to work in past studies is that it may help the unemployed to overcome feelings of anxiety and sadness that are associated with job search.”[45]

I know the truth of this from my own experience. I have been fired twice, in my life. I remember how it felt each time I got the doleful news. I walked out of the building dazed, as though I had just walked away from a train wreck, each time. The sun was shining brightly, not a cloud in the sky; and, since it was lunch hour, as it happened, the streets were always filled with laughing happy people, who had not a care in the world, it seemed.

I remember thinking, “The world has just caved—my world at least. How can all these people act as though nothing has happened?”

And I remember the feelings. The overwhelming feelings, that only intensified in the weeks after that. I would describe my state as feeling sad, being in a funk, feeling despair, feeling hopeless, feeling like things “will always be this way,” or feeling depressed.

Why, oh why, I remember thinking at the time, don’t “career experts” ever talk about feelings? Unemployment was rocking my soul to its foundations. I needed to know what to do about my feelings.

I have since learned that my experience was not the least unusual. Many of us, if not most of us, when we are out of work for a long time would tend not just to say we feel sad, but that we feel depressed—in the layperson’s sense of that word, never mind the clinical definition.

Ours is situational depression, or what we might loosely call unemployment depression. It arises as a reaction to a particular problem time in our lives. If the problem gets solved, which in this case means we find a job, the depression will lift.[46]

In the case of unemployment depression, our greatest desire is to get rid of these feelings now. Anyone who then comes along and tells us they have a quick and easy way to cure it, should be avoided like the plague. But after talking to thousands of job-hunters, I do think there are some things we can do, to make the depression feel not so bad, not so overwhelming.

Unemployment depression isn’t just a matter of feelings. It’s more like a river, fed by four tributary streams: Physical, Mental, Emotional (of course), and Spiritual. And, luckily, there are 12 things we can do about these tributaries, when we’re out of work.

FOURTEEN PRACTICAL STEPS WE CAN TAKE TO DEAL WITH OUR DEPRESSION WHILE UNEMPLOYED

The Physical

1. We can catch up on our sleep, even if it means we have to take naps during the day because our attempt to sleep at nighttime is, at the moment, a disaster. We tend to feel depressed if we are short on our sleep, or our body is otherwise run-down.

There are two states that can be easily confused. First of all, the world never looks bright or happy to us