The economy is picking up, at least we writers feel that in our business. And it could roar. Policy experts Barry Bluestone and Mark Mednick predict that by 2018, there could have been created 14+ million new nonfarm jobs. Yeah, a genuine job glut, with a labor shortage.
To gear up to make that transition from a deadbeat economy to a decent or even good one, most of us have to rid ourselves of Ghosts. There's the Ghost of Hard Times, which will hover over our way of presenting ourselves unless we chase it away. Then there's the Ghost of debt we acquired which we never thought we would. We just gotta suck that up. Otherwise, it will stand between us and opportunity. There's also the Ghost of how things used to be, remember that easy money. Things are the way they are now. End of story. Of course, the Ghost of our childhood past, the blows of early adulthood and all the knocks since then can continue to scare us away from reaching our professional potential.
All this dawned on me when I was watching the DVD of the American Film Theatre's version of Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters." The characters, including the son, are tethered to a dead tyrannical father who remains such as palpable presence that he is literally on stage, though long gone. There is the aristocratic past when the elite didn't have to work and there was carefree pleasure of dancing and flirtation.. There is the haunting of fantasy, yes, the mythology that everything would be better in Moscow. And there is the old ways of managing reality through marriage, which, of course, never did work and doesn't work for the three sisters and their brothers.
The drama is a tragedy of frozen potential. The characters could have moved on but didn't. The longer they stay stuck the more stuck they become. This chilling illustration of allowing Ghosts to take over was enough for me to shake off what was and to break open to what is and could be.
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