Your favorite moments – the best parts of your life – probably don’t revolve around things like money, achievement, material goods, a bigger house, a higher station; all of the things we think about when we think about a “better life.”
I’ll wager that you’ve never “arrived,” i.e., found the life you’ve always dreamed of.
I don’t know anyone who has.
Regardless, especially if you’re under 50, you’re likely in hot pursuit, convinced that your best life is out there, just beyond the horizon.
I have two sets of “best memories:” the first is very early, when my life revolved around friends and family, doing a bunch of stuff together, shared memories, and little to distract me from enjoying the life that was in my lap.
When I hit 30~ish years, I dove instead into the open arms of vocation, and some new, much bigger things to chase. These promised a very clear place of arrival; an end-point where I could finally sit back and be happy enough, so long as I worked hard, made the right decisions, played all the games, etc.
So, up until about 5 years ago, my life revolved around pursuing things I believed would change everything.
It wasn’t all bad. I made money, met people, learned things, perpetrated a few impressive deeds, had some adventures. Almost died. Twice. I lived with much hope, initially, which is never a bad thing. Even a hope that’s impossible to attain is better than no hope at all.
Like a Bad Husband
I chased a ton of things – more than most people, even “arrived” on occasion – but never managed to find the life I believed was out there. I did however arrive enough times to question whether or not the life I’m hoping to find actually exists.
That’s a nauseatingly painful thought when you’ve spent the brunt of your life in pursuit of something that gave you so much hope.
It felt like I was giving up on hope.
But it turned out to be a necessary step towards a better life, one that I never found in so many hot pursuits.
In 2017 I kicked the vocation siren off the boat and signed up for stay-at-home-dad duty. I didn’t totally give up on big dreams, writing here and there, hoping to at least get published somewhere worthy of bragging rights.
Fortunately, I’ve been on this trip long enough to know that none of that will appreciably change my quality of life. Fun and lucrative as it might be, pining away for that life isn’t worth missing this one.
The infinite wisdom of the cosmos has stripped me of any and all dream-chasing opportunities, forcing me with great power to, instead, interface with the life I’m living, the one that’s in my lap, the one that doesn’t require any chasing.
Having embraced that for a few years now, I’m beginning to realize that a different situation – more money, a bigger house, a place on the beach in Hawaii, an easier life, etc. – won’t feel much different than this life.
The first glimpse of this came in 2013 when we bought our current home. It’s bigger, newer, and nicer than our previous one, and for a year or so it did feel like a big, positive, meta-change. But it wasn’t long before life went back to what it was, with all of it’s mundanity and associated maladies.
That cosmic experience makes it much easier to appreciate and enjoy the house I have, and to stop dumping on it every time I see one that’s “better.”
The same goes for my current vocation. I’ve pursued 4 careers to date, all with their ups and downs, none of them leaving me with the impression that I had arrived, or removing my very strong desire to keep the chase going.
Imagine what my marriage would be like if I lived in the constant, agonizing belief that there was a better wife out there, just over the horizon. The same holds true for our hopes and dreams: so many of us are like bad husbands, missing the life we’re living because we’re convinced a better one is out there, tailor made, waiting for us.
But it won’t wait forever – if we don’t chase it now, we’ll miss it.
We suffer, literally, from the pursuit of happiness. We are always on the run, on the move, and on the go. Our goal is not to enjoy the day, it is to get through the day. We have always to get to somewhere else first before we can relax and before we can savor the moment. But we never get there. There is no point of arrival. We are permanently dissatisfied. The feeling of success is continually deferred. We live in hot pursuit of some extraordinary bliss we have no idea how to find.
Nothing makes life more miserable than the belief that there’s a much better one, just within reach, and we’re perpetrating some immorality if we don’t go after it with everything we have. I’m not suggesting that “bigger things” shouldn’t be pursued, but when they leave us dumping on the life we’re living, we’re truly wasting our days, and, ironically, missing our best life.
One Place Free
I’ll always be a big fan of C.S. Lewis, gauche as it is to quote him these days. His thoughts about human desire should always be in the back of our minds, especially when we’re in our pre-50’s “chasing” era. According to him, human desire is too big for this place: we’re meant for something else, a place that’s more suited to what we really want.
Here, however, we’re not chasing houses, or careers, or a “better life.” We’re chasing “heaven,” or whatever it is that humanity is headed for. I have to assume that, if God is real, that place will be tailor made for humanity’s desire for hope, intimacy, belonging, significance, joy, adventure, meaning, pleasure, etc.; the desires that are common to all of us, the ones that refuse to evolve away. Sure, they frequently get corrupted into things like greed, selfishness, pride, gluttony, etc., but if you’re human – from any era – you’ll want what lies at the core of those things, and you’ll understand why I believe that God put them there.
And if God put them there, it’s OK to believe that we’ll end up in a place where they have no barriers or constraints.
But for now, barriers and constraints seem to be all we have, with one very important exception.
We can’t have all the fame we want, or money, or fun, or beauty, or joy, or pleasure. We get glimpses of them, but nothing near what we truly want.
It’s interesting to note, however, that there aren’t many barriers on human intimacy. You can have all of that you want, if you have the courage for it.
And note that if you audit Jesus’ 20 something commandments, they’re all tailor-made to drive us closer to each other, to force us, just as the cosmos does, to value human intimacy above everything else.
If you want to spend your life and your money and your emotional resources chasing something, chase that, and place great hope in the life that comes from it.
My second set of best memories happened in college. I had aspirations of becoming a pilot, but that never got in the way of a few amazing friendships, and a ton of friends. My life revolved around people, doing stuff together, etc., much as it did in my first set of best memories.
No matter what you chase, life is going to feel – frequently – mundane and colorless, disappointing, boring, “less than,” etc., especially in those moments where you see something on the shelf that looks oh so much better than what you have. Sadly, these unsavory things come part and parcel with any and all pursuits. That’s why super rich people keep buying/changing/chasing things, and why they’re not frequentlly found bouncing off the walls about how great their life is.
This is all very preachy, I know, but one day we’ll be old and frail, hardly able to get around on our own, incapable of chasing anything other than the bathroom and a glass of water. In that era, all we’ll have is people, much like our younger days.
We can understand that now, and live the life that comes with it, or wait until our last few years, wishing we would have figured it out earlier.
We’ll also have our memories, and the best of those won’t have anything to do with nice houses or amazing careers. They’ll be full of the people that we managed to love the best, and all of the moments they brought with them.
Photo by Mārtiņš Zemlickis on Unsplash
