There was the Ambition poster that said, “The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.” It showed a fish swimming upstream as a bear waited.

That’s not just hilarious, it’s true.

“Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up”—attached to an image of a man making McDonald’s french fries.

Or his favorite: “Because nothing says ‘You’re a loser’ more than owning a motivational poster about being a winner”—attached to a poster that said “Winners” with a photo of hands raising a trophy.

Sometimes you worked as hard as you could and nothing came of it. It would be great if life always worked out in neat and tidy ways, but the older Kevin grew, the more he understood the whole notion of “life isn’t fair.” It wasn’t just something that was nice to tell children when they weren’t able to buy that fancy bike in the store. Life was indeed very not fair.

Yet what do I have to complain about, anyway?

If he never went outside of this office, then yes, he could complain. He could talk about the lack of clients recently and the lack of bills paid by those clients who had stayed. He could talk about the very real possibility of losing his staff or, worse yet, losing the company he’d worked so hard to build.

But if he was to get off the nice leather chair he owned and open the door and start walking outside, he’d get a different perspective. He didn’t have to walk very far to find someone more hurting, more broken, and more full of despair.

His buddy Seth, for instance, who was going through a bitter divorce from his wife of fourteen years along with needing to find a new job after just being laid off.

Or there was Kevin’s other friend Ray, who was going through the same situation with kids.

The day could be darker, he had to admit. If Kevin was stuck in these four walls looking at a monitor and hearing the silence echoing off the voices in his head, it was easy to start worrying and wondering. But once he got up and started looking at life around him, he saw more.

He not only saw despair, but he also saw hope.

Hope in the smallest of places.

Hope in people like Oscar. Good old Oscar, who probably didn’t even know what a motivational poster looked like.

Oscar was an elderly African-American man about six feet two inches who had a voice like a raspy blues singer. He wore a wool trench coat year-round. He kept gum in his pockets that he’d give to the kids in the neighborhood. Each piece of gum would always have lint stuck to it along with being oddly shaped since Oscar sat or slept on it. The kids always chewed it anyway.

Oscar liked hanging around the downtown Greenville area, and one could always find him since he stood out like a hair in milk. It would be a hundred degrees outside and Oscar would still be wearing that wool coat. Oscar wasn’t the type of man who appeared to have a lot of friends, but everyone in the city knew him. Nobody messed with Oscar.