Blacker Than Black

In North Carolina, we had a friend—a fellow graduate student with my husband—who wore a string around his wrist all of the time. My husband asked him about the string once. The friend explained that he used to work in a restaurant where he mopped floors. He was miserable mopping floors and wished the whole time that he was doing something else, somewhere else. When he left the job to move across the country to attend graduate school, he kept a string from the mop. He wore the string around his wrist to remind him that, no matter how difficult it might have been to leave his family and his home and follow the path he’d chosen, it could always be worse. There’s always something blacker than black.

I told this story to another friend once and her reply was, “Mopping floors really doesn’t sound all that black to begin with.” I’m not sure that’s the point. I think unhappiness, like happiness, is a personal experience. The mopping period was a nadir in this man’s life. Reminding himself of that low point was, for him, an effective way to promote happiness in his current life. It doesn’t really matter if someone else doesn’t think mopping would have been all that bad. Their “blacker than black” moment would be something else, then. And their happiness would come from somewhere else, too, I’d imagine.