The fear of wasting our talent; living a happy but unremarkable life

The funny thing is, I still feel this dread, even though every day I have bubbles, and even overflows, with joy.

This, decidedly, the life I chose and I wanted. “Family first” is our mantra and “It’s a good life, babe” is our refrain. We have a fairly simple life that’s fun, and fulfilling. And joyous. And meaningful. Our days, admittedly, are remarkable mostly because of their consistency.

Our kids waddle into our room, wearing their pajamas of course, at about 6 AM on most days. Robyn and I work our jobs. If it’s a school day, we go through our morning routine with the kids and “do drop off” as a family. If it’s a “home day” we all move a little slower as I prep for the work day and Robyn prepares herself for a day with the kids - mixing in walks with Riley, swim lessons, doctors appointments, snacks, and other modest mischief and adventure throughout the day. 

What anchors our day, on most days, is a free-flowing sequence of cooking dinner while the kids play, followed by a family dinner, dessert, tooth-brushing, potty, pajamas, two stories, and a lullaby before tucking them in.

Our nights and weekends waltz and sashay with different versions of roughly the same activities. We do whatever remainder of work we haven’t crunched through during the day, which luckily isn’t as pervasive, urgent, or stinging as when we both worked in public service. We have chores that never seem quite finished - dishes for me, laundry for Robyn. In the rare instance we watch television, it’s either a British detective drama like Endeavour, or a music competition like The Voice or The Masked Singer.

If it’s a weekend, our chores remain but are different (groceries don’t buy themselves, yet, at least). Our excursions outside are a little longer and a little more like a sauntering ramble than the focused, brisk walk Robyn and I take with Riley at lunchtime when we’re both working from home. 

And then there are the weekend’s mix-ins. We take Bo to soccer practice and try to go to church and participate in civic and cultural life as best we can. We do our best to see our family once a weekend and nurture friendships with our small group of close ties, our neighbors, or extended family. We both steal away an hour of exercise, as many times we can.

I try to write and chip in to the efforts of the neighborhood association and Robyn tries to explore her budding interest in photography, plans trips, and tries to support the other young moms she knows through small but deliberate acts of kindness.

The moment of the week I relish most, probably, is a short window between 8 and 10pm Friday nights. That’s the one part of the week where Robyn and I are most likely to be able to spend together, doing nothing but enjoy each other’s company. This, again, is remarkable only because of the consistency of our activity - we watch a show perhaps, open up a bottle of wine, fire up the power recline feature of our La-Z-Boy love seat, and or listen to some light music while absorbing and reflecting on the last week of our life. It is the time of week, I feel most comfortable.

This is our life. And as I said, it would otherwise be unremarkable if not for its consistency. Because it truly is unglamous, and seriously is not for everyone. Plenty of people would probably go bonkers under our roof, as we would under theirs.

But for us it works. Because as consistently unremarkable our daily grind is, the moments of laughter, joy, love, and gleefully, willing suffering & sacrifice - the moments we live for - are consistent and remarkable.

It’s hard to explain, but there’s an inexplicable ease and warmth I feel when our sons cast spells of “giant golf ball powers!” completely unannounced. Or when we have 60 minutes of struggle and yelling and tears to get out the door, only to spend an hour and a half with someone at their birthday party. Or when we get to walk outside and see the majestic 100-year old trees triumphantly changing color down our block. And there are dozens more small moments like this, which are unremarkable in isolation, but their consistency feels remarkable.

This is the life dreamed of when I was wandering through the badlands as a younger man. It’s the life Robyn and I wanted together and that we both still want, even though we have to hustle for it damn near every day. It is a happy life, made more exquisite by how challenging and sacrificing it is.

This is the life we chose, intended with each other. It is a life on purpose. Every day is a good day, truly. Our life is admittedly quite opposite of a novel, flashy life - much closer to boring than glamorous, more like monochrome than technicolor. But it’s still a thrilling adventure - healthy, prosperous, joyful, and meaningful,

And yet, I hear the echoes of my father’s stubbornly accented voice and the dream-like memory of him talking to me in the kitchen of my family home - “you are a very capable person,” he said, in a way that was straining, almost exasperated even, to make me understand how serious he was.

And then, on top of my serene and happy state of mind, the existential dread sets in.

I have been brainwashing myself to stop comparing myself to others for the better part of a decade. And I’m mostly there, I don’t feel jealously of my peers like I used to. I don’t have the addiction to keep up with the Joneses or stack up my professional resume like I used to. Instead of being acute, my inclination to social comparison and seeking the approval of others is now more of a chronic condition - something I can manage and live with, rather than having to treat intensely after a bad episode. I am more comfortable doing my own thing than I ever have, and I have a better grasp of what “doing my own thing” or “being myself” actually means, than I ever have in my whole life.

This relatively nascent state of contentment has come from looking inward. It has come from consistent, intense, reflection trying to understand my inner world and how that inner-self can integrate with the broader world. I suppose you could say, I’ve tried to put into practice an “examined life” as Socrates put it in Plato’s Apology.

But in that act of examination, I haven’t been able to help but contemplate whether I’ve lived up to my Father’s assessment of my talent, or even my own assessment of my own capabilities.

Because it’s true, I am a capable person, even if I was afraid to accept the responsibility that came with acknowledging those capabilities for most of my life. And so I wonder, have I lived up to what I’m capable of? How much of my talent and time have I squandered?

To be clear, I’m under no delusion (anymore) that given different choices, I’d be more wealthy of famous than I am now. The way I operate and think, I’ve accepted, it not attractive of fat profits or paparazzi. And, I know for sure that I’m not a once in a generation genius whose wasted talent has become a missed opportunity to bend the trajectory of humanity.

What I long for and am haunted by, however, is contribution. Meaning, lower-case “c” contribution. Like how many more people’s days could I have made by now, had I made different or better choices? And by different choices, I don’t even mean sacrificing family or my own sanity to work harder or longer hours. But maybe if I had focused differently, or made different choices on the margins, or gotten drunk on fewer weekends in my twenties, or just tapped into my talents more intentionally or earlier..

How much higher would the literacy rate be if I applied myself to it? How many fewer people in Detroit would have been shot or killed had I stayed in public service for longer or been better at my job? How many companies could I have started by now if I acted on one of the dozens of businesses that I’d thought of with my buddies that ended up becoming profitable enterprises? How many people could I have brought out of a dark place had I lived up to how capable I actually am and been more generous? What might’ve happened if I buckled down and finished this book two years ago? How might the world be a little different, and hopefully better, if I were better and contributing my gifts?

Perhaps the dread I feel is better described as remorse. I have everything I dreamed of, and it truly is enough - I feel fully happy, complete and satisfied. And yet, I feel this guilt and a lingering malaise because I know I had more in the tank to give. I know that in a different version of my life, somewhere else in the multiverse, I would’ve been able to create a cherished and charmed home life while making a greater contribution to the world outside our backyard.

And I suppose it’s true that life is long, and many people don’t hit their stride until well past middle age, some even not until their sixties or seventies. It’s just this bizarre reality where I feel confident in the choices that I made, feel blessed and complete in the life I have, but still feel the heaviness of imagining counter-factual life.

I wonder often if this must be a new phenomenon for people coming of age. Because now, for people coming of age right now, we have a much broader understanding of the world and our role in it. The amount of information we have or travel we can do or people we can interact with, gives us a difficult awareness both of who we are and how we influence others. This heaviness of imagining a counter-factual life probably wasn’t possible for nearly as many people even 30 years ago.

What I’ve tried to take relief is is that despite how informed or worldly we can be in today’s time, we still know very little of how far our actions actually travel. We don’t know the extent of the wake we’ve created for others to be cared for, to grow, to live more freely, or to thrive. Because now, the contribution and goodwill of our actions can travel much farther than they could 30 years ago. This is true because of how globalized our world is, even if most of us aren’t destined to have a litany of press clips to our name because of what we do on this earth.

What I hope for now is that even though most of the contributions that most of us are able to make are unremarkable, we just keep doing them. Over and over. If we consistently put good things out into the world, maybe just maybe it will turn to be remarkable and make an extraordinary contribution. With any luck, if we’re at least consistent in being unremarkable we’ll be towards the end of our lives and we’ll see that our talents weren’t squandered and we’d been making a remarkable contribution all along.

The unmeasured life

The way I think has been a bit of a trap, at least historically.

I have a lot of angst, shame even, that I am not as professionally successful as my peers. No matter how hard I try, even on vacation, I can’t get away from thinking about whether I measure up - either to my peers, or even to the career trajectory I thought I would be on.

Which is all foolish, by the way, because I don’t even care that much about career. Where I intend focus most of my energy is family, community, and character. And yet, because I have been trained in the realm of organizations, business, management, and leadership I am always going back to that foolishness of measuring myself up. 

Because that’s what many of us who are professionals by training - whether in business, law, public service, health, athletics, or anything else - do. We measure things and maximize them, because in our professions the result is what matters.

Again, for me this thinking is a trap. It’s the relentless pursuit of more, and my ego wants me to be cooler, professionally speaking, than I am. And if I use my peers (and my own egotistical visions) as a yardstick, I don’t measure up to that expectation. 

And so I try to cope, probably in a way that’s irrational. Because I try to cope with the fact that I don’t measure up professionally, by counting the ways I think I measure up in other domains. I always think - “I have a loving marriage and family. We have a dog. We have a home we like. I get along with my parents. I have a BMI that stays at a healthy level. We have kids with good hearts. I may not have a fast-track career, but I measure up. I measure up. I measure up.”

And that is the trap. Measuring my non-professional life is the trap. Because what I’ve realized is that, my life is not an enterprise judged by it’s measurable results. My family is not a business unit. It isn’t in the nature of a soul to be benchmarked, standardized, or process-mapped to ensure it has optimal peacefulness.

And by trying to “measure” my non-professional life, I’m propagating this pernicious, unsustainable mindset that my life must be measured. I’m locking myself into a mindset that keeps me anxious and makes me live in a constant state of needing to quench my egotistical desires.

The whole mistake I’ve been making is to try applying the principles and methods of my profession (i.e., focusing on measurable results) to my life. I can’t live at peace with my own thoughts if I try to replace the measurable career results I’m not achieving with an attempt to measure love, family life, children, happiness, faith, peace, experiences, stories, or moments of ordinary joy. Doing what I’m doing locks me into a place where I’m always on the verge of a stomach ache. What I need to do instead is let go of measuring my life.

Because life is something, I think, that cannot be measured.

The problem is, I want so desperately to be able to grab hold of something. My lesser self wants some morsel of incremental progress to remind me that I’m not wasting my life. Some mile marker along this long walk that makes concrete the messy path of life I have ahead and the road I have already traversed. Some interim report card that shows I am doing well at living out the life and that I won’t fail the final exam on my deathbed.

And this is the trap. It’s akin to the plight of Sisyphus. He was rolling a rock up a hill that could never be summited, and I trying to measure my life - something that is not only immeasurable, but that defies measurement.

But after all these years of acculturation and training - how do I resist the near-natural urge of measurement, and instead live an unmeasured life?

I admit now that I should not try to look for mile markers, or anything that charts progress along a fixed path toward a final destination. Because after all, my life has no fixed destination, duration, distance, or pace. Life defies measurement.

But perhaps there is some consolation.

If we know how to look for them, there seem to be where God gives us a window into our inner-compass, to remind us whether we are heading north toward home, or whether we have veered from the righteous path. 

The other day, I had one of these moments. Myles got into a spat with his older brother. He, as a 1.5 year old occasionally bruises his nearly four year old brother. And Bo was sad. And we said, “Myles, that was not nice. It is not kind to hit your brother. You need to say sorry.” And he pondered for a minute. Bo gave Myles a glance back, unsure whether Myles was heading in his direction for reconciliation or to continue the bruising.

But there Myles went, arms outstretched, toward his brother. And it was, without any words or babbles, as sincere of an embrace as I’ve ever seen between two people. It was a moment where my soul reminded my body that it was still in there. It was a moment where God gave me a look at my inner-compass, and it reminded me I was on the right path. 

I never know when those moments are going to come, and sometimes they’re reminders that I’ve veered. But when those moments happens, I am consoled. Because even though they aren’t the mile markers of progress that my egotistical self craves, they are reminders that I am on the right path, heading toward home.

And as much as I would like to, I can’t put moments like that into some sort of scorecard or graph. Those sorts of moments,  where God shares the light see my compass, and reminds me to look, defy measurement. There are so random and nuanced, they can’t be counted or formed into a pattern.

But at least those glimpses are there, consolations to help orient us in a life we want to measure but can’t. It’s still so hard. Because we, who were once young men, are trying so hard not to waste this life, and trying so hard to put one foot in front of the other and eventually reach home. All I want to do is measure something to prove I’m not failing, but what I’m realizing I’m left with is unexpected trail markers which signal whether I’ve veered from the right path or not.

Because at the end of the day, life defies measurement.