The Weather
“As I had prepared myself to go on this first sales call, I had been literally praying for help, and as so often happens when you ask a question in all sincerity, an answer came. In this case, it came in the form of an article I happened to read in a magazine a day or two earlier. An article, of all things, about funerals.
At the average funeral, I read, about ten people cry.
I couldn’t believe it. I had to read the paragraph over again to make sure I’d gotten it right. “Ten people—that’s it? You mean I go through my entire life, spend years enduring all those trials and tribulations and achievements and joys and heartbreaks—and at the end of it, there are only ten people in the world who care enough to show up and cry?”
I went on to the next paragraph. It got worse.
Once those ten (or fewer) people had yanked their hankies and honked their schnozzes and my funeral was over, the number one factor that would determine how many people would go on from the funeral to attend the actual burial would be … the weather.
The weather?
Yes. If it happened to be raining, said the article’s author, 50 percent of the people who attended my funeral would decide maybe they wouldn’t go on to attend my burial after all, and just head home.
Now I really couldn’t believe it. “You mean, I’m lying there dead, at the grand conclusion of everything I’ve ever said and done, of everything I call my life, in those final moments when my entire existence is called to account and acknowledged and memorialized by those nearest and dearest to me, those whose lives I’ve most deeply and profoundly touched—and half the congregation checks out halfway through because it’s starting to rain?”
This really bummed me out … when I first read it. But now, sitting there in my car outside that little drugstore in Gainesville, I discovered it was liberating. “You know what?” I thought. “I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of what I’m doing any more. If the odds are that iffy as to whether or not they even cry at my funeral, and chances are no better than 50/50 that they’ll duck out before I’m planted if the sky happens to cry for me more than the people do … then why am I spending so much time worrying about what they’re thinking now?”
Excerpt From: Olson, Jeff. “The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness.” iBooks.
