Another kind of magical thinking

I just thought of something.

When the boys were little, one commitment I always made to them was to support them up through the bachelor's degree. Not that I expected to boot them out of the house right after that, or at least not necessarily 😃, but that I recognized the bachelor's degree as somehow the threshold of adulthood. Before that, they could rely on me paying their bills. After that, I'd be glad to help out here and there but they should consider themselves to be basically on their own and make plans accordingly. And in fact Son 1 lived with me for a year or so after his graduation, and lately I've been paying Son 2's rent.

But when I look at the timing of the shutdown of my office, the timing of my losing my job with no necessary promise of finding another ... when I look at that, I realize that Son 2 graduated last May. There were other times in the last sixteen years when the business outlook has been grim, but somehow we always hung in there by our fingernails. Somehow I always continued to draw a paycheck. 

So if I wanted to look at the world this way, I could say that as soon as Son 2 graduated in May, I had fulfilled my commitment to them. Since I no longer own a house and I am formally separated from Wife, the last vestiges of my householder status are gone now and I can move on to something else. And so — if I chose to see it this way — I could imagine that the glass bowl over me that protected me from unemployment through all those years was no longer needed and came off. To be clear, that really is magical thinking, because it supposes that events in the world are affected by my own personal statements of will. Also it implies that the world really does revolve around me, which I don't actually believe. I'm aware that anyone can assemble random events into a narrative that looks coherent even when there is nothing to it, and this is plainly one of those narratives.

But yeah, it did occur to me.