My Lot in Life

by Doug Hoffman

I sell cars for a living.

Didn’t used to. I used to do respectable work. I used to create computer software. It was the career to have in the ‘80s and ‘90s. People thought it was “interesting,” even though talking about the details of it bored them to tears. They also thought of it as something that would be beyond them; something that was too difficult for them to do; something they themselves could never understand.

But everyone, in his or her own way, thinks they have a pretty good understanding of what I do now: I move my lips and lies come out of my mouth. I have been selling on the lot for almost exactly a year now, and it has taken much of that time for me to be able to tell people what I do without having it come out like a guilt-drenched admission I learned to recite in some 12-step program.

Yup, I sell cars for a living. You see, the other work went away.

I had supposedly “risen” from being one who creates computer software to being one who manages those who create computer software. I like to think that I was able to make this leap forward in my career because I possess at least a modicum of what are called “people skills.”

Now, believe me, I am more damning with faint praise at this point than I am bragging. I have met a good number of very bright computer engineers in my day. I can say with confidence that communicating with others in what most of us think of as “normal” terms is not always high on their list of abilities. They are, in a word, “geeky.” Some are so wrapped up in the brilliant thoughts going on in their heads that simple daily chores, say… those related to personal hygiene, escape their attention.

So it was in that context that I perhaps stood out as one who could bridge the gap between the denizens of the Techie World and the sales and business people who simultaneously depended on them for their brilliance and avoided them for their strangeness.

By the time my particular work in this world of tech went away, it seemed a career in technology no longer presented the boundless opportunities it once did. Maybe this change came about because technology and its attendant wild promises got too overblown by the turn of the century, and those with money began withholding it when the dot-com bubble burst. Maybe it came about because equally bright, educated people with very modest earnings expectations (and homes in India and China) began to do the kind of work that used to be done in the high-tech Meccas of Silicon Valley, Boston, and other places in the U.S. Or maybe what has happened is that, by the age of 50, I had seen enough of life that sitting in front of a computer screen for 50 hours a week to get the chance to come up with something new and different in some small way didn’t hold my interest like it once did.

But, that’s OK. Surely there would be something else to which I could apply my collective experiences, my modest people skills, or my tendency to enjoy analytical work that would send me in an interesting new direction in my work life.

My wife is the one who hit on it. After I had been out of work for many months, she finally said to me, “You know, you read that Car and Driver magazine cover-to-cover every month. You pour over the car section in the Saturday paper every week knowing darn well you’re not in the market for a car. If you like cars that much, go sell them!”

And, Lo, that very week there appeared in the Classified section not one, but several ads from dealerships looking for salespeople. Some even said that experience was not necessary! I figured, what the heck, I could put on my old business suit, and if I could talk these folks into giving me a job, I could surely talk someone into buying a car!

So, in April of last year, I finally had a new career. I studied up on my dealership’s makes and models, took some video courses on what it takes to sell cars, and by May I was ready to hit the lot and put those modest people skills of mine to work.

My recollection of May last year was that it was a beautiful month. Every day was sunny and warm. The buds on the trees had finally burst into full leaf. All the walks I took led downhill, all car lots everywhere were full of customers, all was right with the world, and anything was possible.

And, soon enough, it happened: I sold my first car. And it was fun! I mean, I just talked with this guy for a little while about cars in general, and about an Infiniti G35 in specific, and I had him drive it. The next thing you know, he’s handing me a check for $35,000, and he’s excited and I’m excited and… this was going to be great!

June came, and my first customer that month almost made me believe I had a calling to do this work. I saw a family out on the lot examining the Volkswagen Beetles. As I approached, I was sizing them up a bit. By the bulge in dad’s T-shirt, it appeared that he was about to give birth to a keg of Budweiser.  As he noticed me and turned in my direction, I thought it was entirely possible that he didn’t have a single intact tooth in his head. Junior didn’t look much more promising. He looked to be about 6’5” and every bit of 300 pounds. He sported tattoos every place I could see and probably some places I couldn’t. His shaven head gleamed in the sunlight like the ball on a chrome trailer hitch… scary dude. Mom and daughter looked… well, normal.

But I had been trained never to try to guess who the buyers are just by looking at them. So I walked up and introduced myself. I sold them that New Beetle (it was for mom) in a matter of about an hour, after sending them out to lunch in it to think it over. And they turned out to be the nicest family I have met out of the hundreds of people I have met on that lot.

When we had business settled, the father told me, “I want to thank you for coming up and introducing yourself to us the way you did. Earlier this morning I was up at the Chevy dealer for over an hour. I walked all over that lot by myself. I even picked out the car I wanted to buy, but not one of those guys would so much as come over and ask if I needed help. I’m never going back to that dealer again. As far as I’m concerned, you have our family’s business from now on.”

I love it when my pre-conceptions are shattered like that. I’m amazed when a simple courtesy that anyone, even someone with modest people skills, would offer becomes a gift of validation to someone else. And I started to think, “You know, I love selling cars.”

But alas, car sales, like everything, has its slow season. And I eventually got the opportunity to experience that, while I may love selling cars, I really didn’t much care for not selling them.

Fast-forward with me, if you will, to January of this year. It’s cold. The trees are bare, and I am standing, now in my new business suit, looking out through the fog on the plate glass windows of the dealership: looking out over the adjacent acreage of car lot. The lot now is snow-covered, the wind-whipped flakes have collected uncontrollably in drifts covering and surrounding the now-hidden merchandise.

Much of Iowa looks this way in the winter, I suppose: a wind-swept field that once held a bounty of corn or soybeans now lies snow-covered and lifeless. Of course, the farmer’s field lies fallow so that it might bring forth new life in the spring.

My field lay fallow as well: Beetles and Jettas and Passats littering the ground like huge, un-harvested pumpkins that weren’t selected by any child at Halloween, and that now are left to rot under their deep cover of snow. I gazed out at this wasteland, knowing that my livelihood was also buried under that foot of snow; knowing that, even when the boys and I removed the snow later that morning, no one would be coming to pick pumpkins that day.

And, as I stood there, that still, small voice rose up within me. You know, that voice that, as we mature, we supposedly learn to listen to; that voice that can provide unexpected insight and wisdom. That voice that, if we are lucky, we learn to understand and eventually use to our advantage in life. And the voice said unto me, “What the Hell are you doing here?”

Science has it that there is a structure in our brains known as the limbic system. Its job is to inform us when we are in danger and help us decide whether to fight or flee. When we leap to avoid the snake in the grass before our mind even consciously registers “snake,” we have our limbic system to thank.

I’m no scientist, but it seems to me that something like the limbic system filters through our higher brain areas that control thought and language. Like the limbic system, this higher-brain system has the function of letting us know when we’re in trouble. Unlike the limbic system of science, this system does nothing other than to tell us we’re in trouble and to make sure that we understand that this trouble is now destined to take over the entirety of our lives… forever. Some of you probably know what I’m talking about: that negative self-talk demon that can inhabit most people’s minds at one point or another in life.

See, so I knew that was all it was when, staring out at that car lot, vacant of people, I began to hear myself think, “Doug, this isn’t working. You’ll never make a go of this. How are you going to pay the bills? So, what – you’re going to work like this until you’re 70? And then what? What made you think you could be a salesman anyway?”

I knew that’s all it was: my “higher limbic system” generating those thoughts and voices. So do you think I gave in to that kind of thinking? Do you think I let it slow me down? <pause> You bet I did! In fact, it got worse:

“You know, your second wife probably didn’t marry you so that she could support you for the rest of her life.”

“If you had only stuck with that promising software company in Boston those years ago, you wouldn’t be faced with this now.”

And, of course, my favorite one comes from my internalized version of my ex-wife’s voice: “I don’t care of nobody is buying cars and you don’t have any money. I can still have you thrown in jail if you don’t make your payments to me.”

I even have one thought that is frustrated that, at my age, I’m still scrambling to earn a buck when, by now, I should have my financial stability well in hand and should be giving something of myself back to the world. Because even now, the needs in the world are so much greater than my own.

I once had a very good teacher and mentor who advised me that when thoughts become negative, expand them to the point where they become so absurd that they are laughable. Having a good laugh about it breaks up the negative thought pattern and sets consciousness moving in the right direction again. Only, my higher limbic system wasn’t laughing. It was expanding on my situation already, and telling me it just got worse and worse.

Maybe I was just that Rusty Old American Dream after all: not too bad on the outside, given all the time it’s been, but weakened and rusty underneath: not really able to cut it anymore where it counts. Could it be that my rust is showing: old skills in a world where change is a daily occurrence and keeping up is a young person’s game; too used to being comfortable to have that fire in the belly anymore, too rigid in my self-concept to see any possibility other than fading away into the sunset? And who is out there anyway to plunk down their money and take a chance that I might be good for one last ride?

John Lennon once wrote, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.” I used to hear that as reassuring wisdom, but staring out at that bleak empty car lot, his lyric became a taunt.

Mark Stringer, our minister, advised me as I was preparing this talk for today that a sermon consists of a question and good news. I think the questions are there for the asking:

·       What is the nature and meaning of work and earning a living?

·       How does one find one’s Right Livelihood, and do we dare not only to look for it, but actually to hold out for it?

·       Is there value in finding a dead end?

·       How do we best make use of the fallow periods in life when everything seems to be on hold and nothing good seems to be happening?

Fast-forward with me again to the present. It’s May once more, and the birds are singing, the trees are leafing, the weather is… well, a little strange this year. People don’t seem to be crawling all over the lot quite the way they did last year. Maybe it’s just my perception. Or maybe it’s that the economy still isn’t great. I know I read more about layoffs than I do about the abundance of good new jobs being created. Maybe it’s that there’s a costly, unnecessary war going on that makes everyone nervous about the future.

Whatever is going on, my perspective is different this spring.

Last month, I was waiting in line at my doctor’s office to check in for my annual tune-up. Ahead of me in line, I saw someone who was vaguely familiar and yet, not quite anyone I knew. As he turned and saw me, I realized it was Bill. I hadn’t seen Bill in about 2 years. That had been at a restaurant where we had both gone to dine with our wives on Valentines Day. He had looked fine then. Now, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Bill was overweight, bloated, reddened, and sickly. When I knew him better, a few years ago, we had played golf and tennis together. He was a pretty good athlete, for a middle-aged desk jockey, and he was always full of energy and ideas. Bill is a senior executive kind of guy, who had been very successful all his life and who lives in an up-scale Clive neighborhood with his wife of 30 years. It seemed he had everything to look forward to as he headed toward retirement age. Now, he was suffering, not from just one thing but from multiple diseases that, in the course of a few short months, had turned him into a completely different person. When I mentioned what a good tennis player he had been, he responded that he didn’t have the energy now to walk up a flight of stairs. And I realized that, whatever my problems, he would probably trade all the stuff he has, and much if not all of what he has accomplished, just to be in my shoes; just to feel the way I feel when I get up in the morning; just to bound down the stairs – if not out of enthusiasm - then out of nothing more than running late to get to work.

Perspective is a tricky thing. Attaining it is one thing, and holding on to it another. It can shift so quickly, depending on what we focus on and how we relate to our attachments.

I was attached to the notion of being a success at my new endeavor. After all, no one likes to fail, even if finding out what you aren’t good at can be a very good thing. I was attached to people liking me and buying cars from me. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, but it isn’t always possible to have both. I was attached to making some money again after months of being unemployed, and I was attached to my self-image as a provider. I never saw myself as a sufferer, but rather as a guy with enough wits about him to manage his way reasonably successfully through life; a guy who others would recognize as worthy of having on their team, eminently employable, a real asset to the enterprise, whatever it was.

I had a neighbor who sold cars for a few months. He did it just on a whim. He had an internet business that was experiencing, shall we say, a lull, and a buddy of his convinced him to try car sales. Paul was an affable fellow and an astute observer of human nature. He told me than in his few brief, and successful, months of selling cars, he observed that the sales people who suffered were the ones who took it too seriously. “It’s only cars, man!” Paul would say. “People are gonna buy one or not. Don’t get too serious about it and you’ll do fine.”

I realize now that I have been serious of late; that the negative self-talk demon has had me convinced that my current bad state of affairs is destined to go on forever. It has convinced me that my attachments are reality, and that my inability to produce the results I wanted so badly are proof that this last little period of my life has been futile and worthless.

I do know better. I have been in worse straits, and certainly countless others have been in far worse straits. And the truth is, some of them find a way through such times and some don’t. Some people are strengthened by adversity and come through hard times with useful insights into themselves and others and the way of the world. And some folks stay stuck in the mess they’re in. They go on looking for reward in a place where it never will be found again, at least not by them. And they go on blaming themselves, or someone else, or Life itself, for their disappointments.

So, which kind of person am I? I still get up in the morning and go to the car lot, knowing that, ultimately, this is not for me. I still sell a few cars now and again and enjoy it when it happens. In fact, just this week, a new customer told me that he couldn’t believe he had never bought a car from my dealership before, because both the dealership and I treated him far better than he had ever experienced before on a car lot.

Did it feel good to hear that? You bet it did. Does it change anything? No, not really. It’s just another thing to be attached to, and attachment, even to good things, is a two-edged sword.

Those of you who read the Intercom, our monthly calendar of events, may have noticed an editorial oversight with regard to this morning’s service that made it into print. In the Intercom, today’s service was described as, “Member Doug Hoffman and his music.” And then, in parentheses, “(Obviously incomplete right now.)”

I’m sure I missed a deadline somewhere for providing a description of my topic. But in reflecting on this obvious error in the printing of the Intercom, I wonder if perhaps I didn’t stumble upon the good news that I was looking for. Member Doug Hoffman, with regard to his lot in life, is most certainly incomplete right now. And I hope I remain that way for some decades to come.

Life is change. Often the most useful and life-altering change doesn’t come easily – how could it? It seems to me that often, profound change comes from need; from being thrust into circumstances that a person would not normally choose, and from finding a way through, that results in an affirmation of self, and of interdependence, and of Life.

Maybe, my lot in life right now is to be in the middle of one of those times of change, and maybe this change actually has a purpose. To think so is surely no less a fiction than the notion that things will remain frustrating and difficult from here on out. Maybe there is such a thing as right livelihood and I am on a journey to discover it, whether I like the idea or not. Maybe there is a purpose to all this, and maybe, in some way, part of me is aware of it. It just hasn’t occurred to me consciously yet. Maybe I would serve myself and others best by facing what’s in front of me day to day openly, honestly and in the best way that I can. In the meantime, I can remind myself to observe my attachments and grow in my understanding of how these are really what make me think that I suffer under circumstances that others would find enviable.

So, I’m heading off into… where? The sunset? Not yet! But certainly off onto some new journey, some new chapter of this life that is obviously incomplete. I know it involves finding a new way of thinking about myself. It probably doesn’t involve selling anything. And I may, after all, be nowhere other that where I’m meant to be.

I’ll write if I find work.