what we have
I once met a guy who used to be a cop, but now had oddly switched to real estate brokerage. “Wow, law enforcement must’ve been an exciting job,” I said. “You didn’t have to sit at a desk and your day was varied and new.”
“No,” he answered. “Actually, it was totally boring. Most of the time you were just doing paperwork, writing tickets, going to the same houses for the same calls over and over again…”
“Oh,” I said, slightly dismayed, my visions of high speed car chases and shootouts and discovered drug labs slowly fading away. I then tried to imagine a job that would be exciting and new everyday. Stuntman, I thought. Jumping off buildings into inflatable mattresses, hanging from airplane wings in flight, sprinting while on fire in a flame suit…
But no, I then remembered I had already met someone who had been a stuntman, and he had been teaching my marketing writing class when I worked at IBM. “You can’t be a stuntman forever,” he had said. “Besides, it was really hard work.”
As is usually the case, things we don’t have always seem more exciting than what we do have. I’m always subconsciously on the lookout for situations more stunning than my own. The only ordeal that stops me in my tracks is when I am forced to converse with someone who has a worse case of the “wish I had” disease than me. I met a man who, about a year ago, found out I was interviewing for a particular high-profile valley tech company (to remain unnamed). “Oh, I would love to work there. That would be SO cool.” he said. “You need to tell him what it’s really like, since you were there,” his wife said to me. My mind flitted back to one of the haggardly looking women who interviewed me, her pathetic, crumpled up daily schedule, and her pained expression when she tried to answer my question about work-life balance at the company. “Yeah, um,” I said. “I’m not sure if I should shatter his fantasy.” For a living, he was a musician, and spent his off time at the barn watching his wife ride in her lessons and petting the horses. I realized then that pleasant dreams about other life venues are completely acceptable, even romantic, as long as they don’t interfere with your real life. They can even be motivational, and encourage you to explore paths you might not otherwise consider if you followed the same routine day in and day out. It’s when your vivid imaginings of these other possible lives make your daily existence miserable that you have to take a step back and consider the negative effect this “desire” has on your life.
A friend of mine who seems perpetually dissatisfied with her life path sent me a quote about success being getting what you want, and happiness wanting what you have. I think the expectation when reading this quote is that you will instantly think, “That’s true, I’m very successful but still not happy. I need to work on that.” Yet, is the inverse true? The quote doesn’t actually say that unhappiness is wanting what you don’t have. In fact, there are many things I want that I don’t have, and these things don’t cause me nearly as much agony as the thought of losing what I have now that makes me really happy.
This entry was originally titled “What We Don’t Have,” but I changed it halfway through writing it, because it’s really about the opposite. It’s a little note to remind myself that yes, I’m pretty happy with a lot of things I have, and it’s a note to someone who I know is reading this that he’s a big part of that.
