I find myself in regular encounters with people who have tidy lives and are so far removed from my messy, over-wrought reality that we might as well be living on separate planets (except we aren’t…we are all in this together.) I call them the tidy-widys.*
They come from plenty even though some of them don’t quite realize how having plenty paves their way and makes them who they are.
Plenty means that, for them, there is:
- Always enough money to pay the bills in full (no carry-over debt for them)
- Money to travel when they want (or need) to
- Well-resourced neighborhoods or suburbs or bucolic towns
- Weekend and vacation homes to gather with family and friends and to get-away from the every-day
- Fully-resourced organizations with positive bottom lines and uber-efficient staff (who take care of those messy details)
- Cleaners to clean their private messes
- Money to pay their bills (always)
Many of them have had this lifestyle/position/world-view from their grand and great-grandparents forward. Others have only achieved this status in their lifetimes and never look back to what they’ve survived.
My observations are not necessarily negative in and of themselves except when you have to work with them and::
- Listen to them eschewing others who don’t have what they have
- Witness their sanctimoniousness because people don’t roll the way they roll
- Shudder that they are making decisions that impact those of us whose lives don’t allow us to be as tidy.
While writing this, the opening lines to Stevie Wonder’s hit song, Uptight: Everything’s All Right, popped into my mind, although he was singing about something entirely different when he sang:
Baby, ev’rything is all right, uptight, clean out-of-sight.**
For the tidy-widys, everything is:
All right
Up-tight
Clean and
Out-of-sight
Later in the song, Stevie Wonder sings “No one is better than I, I know, I’m just an average guy.”
I’m gonna have to keep reminding myself of this fact and not let the tidy-widys get to me.
Related
*TIGHTY-WHITIES: THE SEMANTICS
** Performed by Stevie Wonder (Uptight: Everything’s All Right, 1966)
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Money Luck (At the end of this post is a link to an essay I wrote, “I Hate Those Women.” – it is relevant to this post.)
This post touched a cord as I read it, reminding me of the many past times where I was in the presence of the Tidy-widy crowd ( a mixed race assembly). It takes fortitude oftentimes to even open the doorway to begin a meeting or to engage in conversation. But that feeling dissipates if we take a deep breath and focus on our own strengths, our personal journey and the reality that we will keep on keeping on, just as our ancestors continued to due.
Thank you for taking the time to read and leave thoughtful and wise comments about my post, JB. My head nearly exploded recently when I heard some comments and saw the dismissal of an organization that was woefully under-resourced by the tidy-widy set.