Bravery versus Stupidity

A man jumps into a rain-swollen river to save a floundering dog. He struggles to drag the dog against the current and the two eventually arrive exhausted at the river’s shore. Is this an act of bravery or stupidity? How do you decide? What distinguishes bravery from stupidity?

I believe that outcome and perspective determine which adjective to use. Let’s add a few more lines to my little story:

After arriving at the shore, the dog heads up the riverbank towards the road. The man climbs the steep shoreline behind the dog, drags himself upright, and, due to the exhaustion produced by his Good Samaritan efforts, faints, and falls to the ground. A passing truck, blinded by the pounding rain, runs him over and kills him. The dog walks away, tired and wet but otherwise unharmed. The man leaves behind a wife and two small children.

So I ask again, is this an act of bravery or stupidity?

Now, I’ve done a lot of brave vs. stupid things in my life. I’ve had my partying days, experienced the spins while driving home after drinking way more than a body should. I didn’t hurt anyone else along the way and suffered only a hangover as my penance. Clearly, though, this was an act of stupidity.

I’ve also stayed in a failing marriage because it was easier to do so than it would have been, at that time, to leave. I had two kids who weren’t even in school yet and no job with which I could support my family. My parents made a generous and loving offer of support if I should choose to leave…but I stayed. A year after making my choice, a friend told me how brave I was. Brave? I didn’t feel brave, I felt cowardly and lazy and stupid. I was still unhappy and the rift in our marriage wasn’t healing. It was easier, and safer, then, to stay on the riverbank than to jump in and save my sinking sense of self.

Let’s give the drowning-dog story a different ending:

After arriving at the shore, the man huddles with the dog for a moment so that each can catch their breath. He reads the tag on the dog’s collar and realizes that the dog lives just across the road. He carries the dog up the shore – not without effort – crosses the road and rings the doorbell of a large home. The owners, in awe of the man’s selfless act and delighted with the return of their beloved pet, call the local newspaper. The event and a profile of the Good Samaritan appear in the paper. Within the profile is a description of an invention that the man has patented. Large companies vie for the opportunity to manufacture this invention and the world becomes hooked on the gadget. The man becomes enormously wealthy.

Brave or stupid? Should we add ‘lucky’ to the list?

After being stupid for a while, I took some tentative steps towards bravery. After 7 years as a stay-at-home mom, I got a job. I forced the ultimate demise of my not-getting-better-but-sure-getting-worse marriage and stood up to the challenges of single motherhood. I’ll never know how much harder it was for the kids to experience a divorce after they had years of life in a conventional family. I was lucky to have a boss who believed in me and pushed me to return to school to finish my education. A friend dared me to try internet dating and, after a year of men who misrepresented themselves as tall, handsome, or just plain human, I received an email from a guy who lived in Richmond. We were married in our backyard 15 months later.

Now I’m looking at another flooded river and another floundering swimmer who needs salvation. I quit my job. Yes, in this terrible economy, with few glimmers of hope to illustrate any tiny rebound in the record unemployment numbers, I walked away from a paying gig. Brave or stupid?

I was a contractor working with a very generic, non-specific job description. I don’t blame the company for that – the position and the systems were entirely new to them and they really didn’t know what they needed or what the job would grow into until everything started to roll. I took it all in and ran with it – I did what needed to be done. This, I find, is an attitude completely contrary to what typical contractor positions demand. Contractors do what they are paid to do; employees (those folks with the tasty benefits and pay) do what the company needs them to do. I did what the company needed me to do. Further, I anticipated what the company needed and structured the systems and my work to support those future needs.

During my interviews, the job was described as having the high likelihood of becoming permanent and, after 3 months on the job, they told me they wanted to hire me. Then they told me there was a hiring freeze on. Then they told me that they’d pleaded my case as high as the President of our division and still weren’t able to hire me. A voluntary reduction in force found the company with 1400 fewer employees – 400 more employees than they’d planned to reduce. The company started hiring again and my spirits picked up.

I presented the organization with a comprehensive list of the work that I was performing. For each item, I clearly identified the capacity in which I was operating: business systems analyst, training and development, process improvement, etc. I asked for more money based on the breadth, depth, and importance of my work product. An extra dollar an hour was my reward. As well, my job description was rewritten. My work was scaled back to pure, mindless data entry. All the things I loved most about the job were removed from my scope. I’m sure that someone will be taking on these challenges but that someone was not identified or communicated, either to me or to my clients. In the meantime, the status quo never changed and I assume they expected me to just keep working and keep producing whatever was needed. I am comfortable with this assumption given my supervisor’s admission, “I really don’t know what you do.” Yes, this would be the same person who re-wrote my job description.

Remember that Howie Mandel game show, ‘Deal or No Deal’? The one with the models and the suitcases with the dollar amounts in them? Jim was a loyal ‘Deal or No Deal’ watcher for a while and I would watch occasionally when my homework was finished or when his yelling at the television became more than I could ignore from my office across the hallway. I don’t know what his fascination was with the show – for him, it was akin to watching a car crash in slow motion. He’d bitch about how stupidly the people were behaving if they didn’t cash out when the odds were in their favor. There was always a clear point where the contestant’s bravery slid right into the wall of stupidity and that’s the moment when Jim would begin to rail at the TV. He’d complain so much that I’d actually beg him to find some sporting event to watch instead.

That’s what I’ve been playing – the employment version of ‘Deal or No Deal’. I’ve been picking suitcases without weighing the odds of what might be inside the next case. I’d justify my choices by spending 2 hours each night complaining about the 9 hours I’d spent at work and trying to figure out what I could do to change a situation over which I had no control. Jim and the kids are tolerant but even they couldn’t stand it anymore. Jim’s also very intuitive and knows how to reach right inside me and pluck the string that resonates the most. He didn’t ask me to change the channel, he simply told me, “I want my wife back.”

I was a contractor who had been on the job for 22 months. For 20 of those months I operated under the expressed concept of becoming a permanent employee as soon as possible. On July 1, I was told that my job would never become permanent and that the company would continue to staff the work with a contractor. What incentive was there to stay? My staffing company has been telling me that they have positions to which they’d submit my resume...but not until I quit my current job. I get this – it’s a clear conflict of interest for them and would appear that they favored one client over another. When the conflict of interest became clear for ME, I quit. The odds were no longer in my favor – hell; the odds couldn’t even see my favor from where they were standing. For me, the next suitcase would have been totally empty.

So, brave or stupid? I’m straddling both sides of the equation now. My professional contentment level and the effect that it has had on my family is a drowning dog and I’ve just jumped into the water to save it. The correct adjective won’t be determined until I land somewhere else and look back at this decision. I’ve taken a leap of faith – and that’s a really big leap for a person who loves to be, needs to be, in complete control of her own situation. (And tries to be in control of all the situations around her or, at least, have some input to them.) In the meantime, I’ll swim really hard and rely on the teeny bit of faith that I do have and borrow some of the massive amount of faith that my husband has if I need to. He thinks I’m being really brave but I think that’s because he’s tired of watching me be really stupid. I’ve noticed that he’s been watching an awful lot of sports lately.