Years ago, a friend had just had their home remodeled. It was amazing – completely gutted and renovated from top to bottom. Sadly, the newest homes aren’t perfect, and my friend found great disappointment in the manufactured flooring that flexed up and down a bit. It seemed to affect the entire experience.
I can relate, constantly finding a similar great disappointment in my house. It has tons of flaws that have somehow come to define the whole thing. The block we live on, for example, is populated almost entirely with rental properties. There are cars everywhere, like someone’s constantly throwing a frat party. In addition, the people who built our house weren’t exactly top-tier craftsmen; it creaks and groans regularly, giving it a cheap-ish sort of feel, especially when I compare it to other, bigger, newer homes.
When we first moved in, everything was amazing; the newest, biggest house I ever lived in. 6 months later, everything went back to normal; the house became just another house and one more item on my ever-growing list of things that can’t seem to live up to my expectations.
I could list many things that have disappointed me in these 55 years of trying to find the life I’ve always wanted: career, relationships, money, oh so many material pursuits, etc.
If I could impart one piece of wisdom it would be this: we can’t get away from disappointment. No matter what we pursue, or what our hopes and dreams are, disappointment will follow us into them, like an old, scraggly dog that you can’t get rid of.
At the same time, we need it. The life we’re aching for doesn’t happen unless we experience disappointment with some regularity.
If experience makes one an expert, I have a black belt in disappointment and would like to share a few things it’s taught me over the years.
The Currency of Heaven
Nobody’s truly pining away for a bigger house, or a dream career, or that perfect marriage. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing those, but the biggest disappointments I’ve suffered were those rare moments when I got my hands on something I’d always dreamed of. They didn’t change my life like I thought they would, and they certainly didn’t make my desires go away. In most cases, getting more things and climbing higher ladders just made my desires worse.
What the human soul is dying for is much bigger, much more eternal than the stuff we think we want. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when the cosmos, like a frustrated parent trying to convince her teenager that the latest pair of Air Jordans really isn’t that big of a deal, says no.
Confused as we can be about our desires, I’m convinced that when we reach our deathbed chapter, we’ll be more in tune with what we truly desire than at any point in our life, and it will have nothing to do with “the next thing.”
We’ll be thinking about people. Our best memories will revolve around and be intimately tied to our closest friendships. What we’ll want more than anything else is more of that. Closeness. Love. But we’ll have to get to the end of ourselves to realize it.
So go, young conqueror, grab all the brass rings you can, but if you fail to make human intimacy at least an equal priority, you’ll regret it.
Fortunately, we’ll never find ourselves in a place where friendships aren’t available. We might not always get to hang with the cool, pretty folks, but we can always make a friend, or get closer to the friends we already have.
If that sounds boring to you, it might be that you’ve never gotten close enough to understand the power of human intimacy.
Either way, if disappointment is the mortar, people are the bricks.
The cosmos has placed no boundaries here, save the disappointments that herd us toward a deeper relationship with humanity.
Western Thankfulness
I once watched a documentary about a tribe in Africa where the men (all married) adorned themselves and danced for a woman who would decide on a winner, then have with him one night of tribally sanctioned hanky panky.
But because there can only be one winner, about 20 guys went home disappointed.
One guy in particular had high expectations that he would be chosen but was forced to return in shame to his every day, hum drum marriage. It didn’t take him long however to remember the bride of his youth, the person committed to him like no other. In short order, according to his post-contest interview, his life with her took on a glory it didn’t have before his pursuit was redirected.
I doubt the guy who won went home the next morning with a deeper appreciation for his marriage. That’s how it often works; brass rings, higher ladders, more stuff, and new experiences seldom leave us in appreciation of the life that we’re too often trying to ditch in the hopes of finding something a little less hum-drummy.
Many, many times, disappointment has forced me to stop running and take a deeper, much more appreciative look at what I have.
The Right Us
Only a select few of us will win. We’ll be a huge success at business, or become someone everyone wants to hang out with, or find a bunch of money, or whatever. The rest of us, i.e., 99% of humanity, will have to wade through a much more mediocre existence.
A big chunk of mediocrity’s victims will feel like losers because, though the winner’s books were studied hard, we just couldn’t make it work. That’s bad because, in western culture – our movies, music, discourse, etc. – mediocrity is failure.
So it is of utmost importance that we at least elevate ourselves above the mediocre, to find a way come hell or high water to distinguish ourselves above the mailman, or the waiter, or the guy who collects our garbage, or whoever else we labeled “just needs to aim higher.”
Around this spins the Western cultural idea of “losers” and “winners,” a caste system based on income and/or accomplishment, one that ignores the weight of a human being and renders null and void the peace and hope that comes from appreciating what we truly are.
I’ll tell you from experience that when you live in this back-alley dumpster it’s impossible to have a healthy view of yourself. Without this, you’ll either spend your life feeling like a loser, or scratching and clawing for something meaningless because you don’t want to be like all the other losers.
My career disappointments in particular have forced me to reconsider; reminding me over and over again that I’m just like everyone else, and everyone else is just like me. My attempts to distinguish myself above others have been little more than a rejection of the unconditional greatness that we all possess, while my disappointments have conspired to teach me something that I couldn’t have learned otherwise.
If nothing else, I’ve learned in my many years that no matter what I pursue, disappointment is coming along for the ride, always there to redirect me toward what matters most.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
