Thomas Sullivan

My mother liked to get things done and hated to impose on anyone. This may be why she never made it to the maternity ward and birthed me in the lobby of a hospital. It was the first of many surprise entrances through the wrong door at the wrong time of life that have dogged me ever since. Now you might think that bad timing would be fatal to a writer or to anyone reaching for high stakes against long odds, and you’d be right. Bad timing can interrupt the flow of routine events, cause missed opportunities, and create challenges that turn people inside out. It is synonymous with bad luck. But it also makes life interesting, and now and then – just every now and then – it flips over the wild card that trumps all other possibilities, wins the jackpot, and redefines the game.

Used to be I focused on the downsides of luck and timing, bitching with the best of the malcontents, and was very imaginative in seeing how a thing could fail or go wrong. Writers especially are great at foreseeing dooms, little and large. They are not good at solving them, however, until they learn how to write endings. My parents thought it was hysterical when they challenged 10-year-old Tommy to write down all the offenses his big sister perpetrated on him and he came up with two pages of Machiavellian psychology. Sadly, I got better at that before I got… uh, better.

Now I’m sad for the good people I see daily whose tender dreams are crippled by cynicism. Include all dreamers and unsung talents who think they are down on their luck. Include lots of entertainers, even A-list successes. The trouble is that negative expectations are another example of bad timing. The word expectations tells it all. This is a preemptive word, an anticipatory term that has the power to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it is dangerous to use it to rehearse failure. Do not send your expectations into battle with a white flag or otherwise defenseless. Much safer to arm them with all the positive weaponry you can muster. Yes, I understand the psychology. Negative expectations temper disappointment and buffer shock, provide a vacation from stress, and shift blame if blame is important to you. Hope, on the other hand, is hard. It is a risk that taxes the emotions and creates vulnerability. It borrows against a future that may become insolvent, but… are you ready for this?

It is always timely.

It comes exactly when you need to optimize your potential future. It provides motivation, greases the skids, and is the only bus out of town for Disney World. And here is what most people miss:

If it fails to deliver, it can be rolled over to the next hope.

You never need to attend the funeral of a hope. When one expires, it doesn’t leave a mess unless you bleed over it and cry unduly or stomp up and down on the corpse of hope in a tantrum. What you can do is look at the lesser or greater options remaining, stick out your thumb, and hitch a ride on the next best hope. The new one may call for a completely different road and destination. So be it. Start thinking of the dawn’s new wardrobe. What will you wear tomorrow? There is a tomorrow. Always. The day after victory is tomorrow, the day after defeat is tomorrow, aftermath is tomorrow. It’s going to come whether you get pissy about it or not. So why waste a single moment? The only guarantee you’ll ever get is that the heart and soul of you proceed by moving from one hope to another, because…

If a hope does deliver, you will then hope for something else.

Still, if you’re a writer, you spend most of your time waiting at the wrong end of long odds, picking up the pieces of disappointments, or looking for escapes from the stress of putting your creative energy and tender hopes on the line yet again. You suspect that Lady Luck’s real name is Lucy. “Hey, Charlie Brown,” she shouts, “I promise this time I won’t jerk the football away just when you get your hopes up that you’re about to kick a winning field goal.” But she does. Usually. Bad timing can look like a conspiracy.

I guess it was March 17^th that put it in perspective for me. The date itself, I mean. Beware the Ides of March plus two. Starting decades ago, that first infamous March 17^th registered on me as the day I missed my event in the swimming nationals. And every March 17^th thereafter for a few years I noticed something else dire happened. I couldn’t believe it. Bad timing in the extreme. Snake-bit, I thought, a gambler’s mentality – and there was a time when, if you could call me anything, it could only have been a gambler. March 17^th became the annual culmination of the habitual bad timing that defined me. Maybe my dreams were too big, my compromises too small. I seemed forever to have almost succeeded while in reality achieving nothing, and March 17^th was invariably another defeat to wallow in.

And then one year – not on the dreaded date – I had a moment of miraculous timing that revised everything. I have written about it before in another context (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/08/16/thomas-sullivan-24-hour-insects-dusty-dreams-eternal-islands/ ), so I’ll just say that cosmic lightning flashed at precisely the right moment to allow me to save my son from drowning in a chill, dark Canadian lake. The marvel of that timing offsets all the others, of course. He is alive today. The disasters of each and every March 17^th fade to meaningless if that was the compensation. The pendulum swings both ways. Revelation:

You can’t keep the books on destiny or fate.

It’s natural for personal survival to skew our judgments about ourselves, but thinking you’re a perpetual victim is a sure-fire way to become one. That’s just as mindless as being a giddy Pollyanna driven by guilt. The true perspective lies somewhere in between, and if you try to keep score, you’ll likely screw up the proportion or the scope of what happens to you. Sadly, I DO – sort of – still keep score, but I do so more out of wonder than trying to make a case for how deserving I am of anything. And you know, it’s utterly amazing how things can work out. Yeah, I’m still the exception to every rule and out of sync with the human condition, but maybe that’s what I’ve chosen to be. Because when you don’t follow the script, you get to write your own. The most important things in my life have been freak timings. Whether they were good or bad depends on what I did with them.

The March 17^th fateful date has migrated a little over the years. It’s more of a window now. Last year it happened on March 27^th and it was probably the happiest day of my life. Whatever comes, I no longer fear it. I’ll trade all the red stoplights, untimely electric outages, and unforecast rains for the next big swing of the pendulum my way. And the bad timing seems almost necessary to the adventures I live daily. It rescues me from routine, saves me from following the herd, and challenges me to invent bigger-than-life romantic perfection in place of what I used to think I missed.

Bad timing creates unique opportunities.

It also creates material. Like they say, nothing is wasted for a writer. You want I should give you an example? You think I should pay some dues? Okay, okay. A couple of hours ago I was eating a turkey club wrap at the ski chalet when some girl scouts sat down around the table in front of me. Guess that made me think of girl scout cookies because I got up and bought one of those $1.25 chocolate chip jobbies. Red alert – bad timing, bad timing! ‘Cause as soon as I got back to the table I noticed one of the mothers was passing out flyers. Yeah, those flyers. Each girl was receiving her sales sheet, and there I sat with the crumbling evidence of my fondness for the very product they were selling, wondering if I could wing it down my throat like a Frisbee. But it was too late. They descended on me like flies on an outhouse. Hey, if you’re on my Christmas list, you know what you’re getting. Try not to notice come December if they’re a little stale. Think of it as bad timing…for which there will be compensation.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website. My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds. I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! And finally, David Niall Wilson, whose questions are like laser brain surgery, has done a new interview of me at this link: Home [Note: if you don’t get to this link while I’m on the front page, click the word Shadeaux in the box and you’ll find me in the Interview archives for March 11, 2008.] Does anyone ask better questions than DNW? Squirm, squirm. Thanks for reading.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/