In the desolate 2:00 am blackened bedroom all the stories you tell yourself to bring sleep, shattered like a broken mirror in a million razor blade shards of all the things that could go wrong.  Eyes wide corpse like stiff. You don’t even toss and turn. You can only hear the rain on the roof, hoping there’s no leaks. Only feel the wind, in the bending branches of the trees poised to bash right through your bedroom window and let the storm drench and flood the carpet and the bed along with any hope or promise you once might have felt for the coming of the sun.

Then you are watching your own eyes pop open. Still dark. Turn to the clock radio. “Shit, I overslept.”

You wonder, “Is this where it starts? That crumpling slide of an internal discipline lost?”

You just overslept. That’s all. It’s not like you have somewhere to be. Don’t make it out to be more than it is.

You throw on jeans, flannel shirt, windbreaker. Grab three quarters, still in the dark, and step out onto Grace Street. Off to get the newspaper.

Walking under the train crossing. The rushing throbbing raw power of the steel barreling down the tracks towards the city. Train car lights against the darkened sky. All those people.  Going to work. Going to work early.

You pass the old choir robe factory. Now condos just redone. Priced to sell but all sitting empty. Architecture of the giant stone and brick development draws the eye. This will someday look as if it sat on a quiet side street in Paris. Some new Chopin plunking out a melody like a summer stream of diamonds drifting from the window of a top floor  home with an eastern view. A light from a garden apartment in the corner where an aspiring someday Marilyn Robinson scrawling out pages before it’s time to get dressed and take the el downtown.

This old factory, you are told by the tiny young tree where you listen for a voice that once guided you through pretty much everything, this old factory will weather well through tough times to come.

You smile at the tree and say almost out loud, “Well I guess you were wrong about the whole, when you’re gone, that’s it” way of thinking! You might have been a Buddhist. But I’m sure glad I got you to come to church that one time!

And you laugh because you know she’d shake her head and be laughing back at that line.

Then you ask, what’s next? Tell me how to do this. Are we going to make it through this? Is this me giving up?

She answers back in the early morning wind rustling gentle the leaves just like it did when you were small and watched the trees that lined the lake.

There are no words. But the wind brings the thought that you are still talking with her. She is still answering.

So what do you think now about this whole “rising from the dead thing now?” you ask her.  “Appears to me it’s true!”

You see her smile. Hear her laugh again. “Don’t forget the Buddhist part too,” she says, “and just keep walking because things will change. Yes it is bad. Could even get worse.  But you are not giving up. You are not giving up.

You are simply not here to give up.”

So you reach the corner at Lincoln Avenue. A mini van pulls up as you reach down to plunk the quarters in the blue newspaper box. Parent in the front. Kid strapped in back. You look up and that driver, that parent,  is checking you out, and it’s one of those good checking you out looks.

So the parent smiles. Half embarrassed. Half remembering a time long ago. The light changes and the mini-van pulls away.

In the darkness of the city artery you walk a few blocks. Past the shuttered storefronts of small business dreams gone sour. You pass the expensive place you’d go for celebrations. Or at the end of a tough week. That place where they know your name and really are glad to see you. Even when the times meant you couldn’t afford to go there too much at all anymore.. On the door, scrawled on the back of a ripped envelope.

Closed temporarily. Sorry. Thanks.

The picnic tables are still out on the street next to the place. But no one has emptied the garbage cans. The neon light that names the place still blazing. But no one has watered the plants. And the last time you were in, one of the brothers that gave the place it’s name wasn’t there---he had taken a job somewhere else you were told.

Just temporary.

You keep walking as the sun aches its way slow up into the eastern sky. Suddenly you hear a car horn honking wildly. You turn around and there she is. One of your favorites from when you used to go to church regularly. Smiling and waving, in the passenger seat. Another elderly woman you don’t know driving the car. Your old friend from church---she doesn’t come round much anymore. Found another church.

But when you both went you would love the moments just knowing she was there. The moments on the committees when she’d speak and you’d hear real world wisdom. All the times you’d teased her about something or another because something told you she never had enough of that and it was the way to show you cared.

That one Sunday morning you didn’t go to services and then saw her in the hardware store later in the day. So you pretended to shield your face in embarrassment, exaggerated tip toes as you walk past her, as if you were hiding,  and she said, “You know, I’m not sure, but I don’t think God minds a break every now and then.”

When you both went to church; you didn’t network. You communitized. Networking is about an event. Communitizing is about belonging.

Of course the communitizing came later. You don’t just show up one day and say “I’m here! Feed me!!”

Like work search--you start with story. Your own. Because that’s really all you know. Your story. Who are you? Why are you here? What problems can you solve? What kindness can you put into the world? How humble can you be?

Your story starts everything. Especially your search for work in these hard times. Your resume is not the point. Your story is the point.

Then you add the music. It’s the music that brings the story alive. The music that wakes up the reader and gets them to sing, to start tapping their toe.

Giving up means there is no music.

Adding the music to your story means harmony ---the way you sing with others. It means rhythm, the way you show up to work everyday, it means tone, that discrete musical sound that makes you different from the other 1,000 people applying for that chance to work.

With story and music, you begin to explore the mystery. That which is bigger than you. Not what you’ve done---but what you have the tools and the courage and the heart to do. All the ways you know how to do the work---that would look like mystery to anyone watching from the outside.

Exploring the mystery means "what does it look like when I'm at my best, getting work done, work that only we know about here. Work that not everybody's figured out.

Then you communitize. And it becomes like a symphony.

In a symphony, no one gives up, not one single marching soul in the giant teeming parade of the uncounted unemployed.

How can you give up in the face of a symphony?

Then from the symphony comes the last of the 5 guiding lights. From the symphony comes stewardship.  From the symphony you begin to practice stewardship. To take care of something bigger than you. Whatever that is. And it could be ANYTHING!  Last, week, he tells you, he took care of his grandchildren for the week. This builder of companies, developer of people and maker of money took care of his grandchildren. With the very same  patience and drive and sparkling accountability, responsibility and authority he did when he built companies. Last week he practiced stewardship.  

This week, on the phone, some how his voice loses that tension when he talks about his grandchildren.

He is not giving up.

Not today.

Stewardship. It’s just got to be bigger than you and it’s got to be something worth taking care of.

And in that roiling swelling parade of lost souls, the uncounted unemployed---there will be just a few who “get” stewardship. And that will be so understandable. Because pain, and hunger and disease and no chance for help from anyone leave little room for theory or abstract thought. And advice pretty much always comes up empty.

How can I take care of something bigger than me when I am hungry and tired and thought I’d be retired by now and I have a pre-existing condition---as most of us human beings do?

So you keep listening as you walk for all five of the guiding lights---start with the story, add music, explore the mystery, communitize and practice stewardship.

The guiding lights  flare and flicker with the rhythm of the days. They are not a recipe. There are no recipes for this. If there were, you would have used it.

You will need to find all 5 of these streetlamps of guidance. And they won’t present themselves in order. They will  never be found on careerbuilder dot com.

So you keep looking. Keep walking. Because you can’t give up. It is just not in you to give up.

The five guiding lights are wild, just beyond your reach and you wonder what color they are? How do they smell? Can I buy them somewhere? Maybe at Target or Costco? Maybe even rent them.

It’s quiet on the street. The sun is up. So it’s time to find work.

Not a job. There are no jobs. The jobs are gone. But there is work.

There has got to be work.  And it’s quiet. So you listen.

Go home, fire up something on the computer or maybe even open an old fashioned letter. Maybe even make a phone call.

All of this in deathly quiet. With the memory of maybe giving up still very much alive and festering like a raw open sore.

Then you get a letter. It’s your letter. It could say anything you want.

You could even write it to yourself if that would make it work. But between the lines of that letter you see the recognition of the fear: “So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we just ain’t that young anymore.”

That’s what the fear sounds like. “We’re scared and we’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore.”

And from the beating heart rhythm of a Jersey girl’s laughing whip smart eyes of merry wisdom you hear this: “Show a little faith. There’s magic in the night."

It’s the music!

You will not give up now.

Not this day. You will not give up.

You will listen and look for the lights.

From: “How to Find Work When There are No Jobs” Copyright. 2009 Roger Wright