“He didn’t love farming enough to be a farmer, much as he loved it, but he loved it too much to be entirely happy doing anything else. He is disappointed in himself. He is regretful in some dark passage of his mind that he thinks only he knows about, but he can’t hide it from his mother. I can see it in his face as plain as writing. There is the same kind of apology in him that you see in some of the sweeter drunks. He is trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.”
I find this passage from Hannah Coulter to be gut-wrenching.
In it, Hannah — now in the dusk of her life — reflects on her son Caleb who left Port Williams to pursue a Ph.D. and a career in the city.
How many of us suffer for want of “the life we might have had”?
I think it’s good to be honest with yourself about this question. What is the source of those images? Is it really something that resonates deep down in your being, or does it come from somewhere else?
The problem with fixating on “the life we might have had” is that it makes us take for granted the life that we do have.
For me, an important part of maturing has been letting go of these visions. For example, for a long time I wondered what my life would have been like if I had ended up applying to medical school. However, if I am honest with myself, at that point in my life I couldn’t say with full conviction that being a doctor was what I knew I wanted to do — a lot of the messaging was coming from other sources (society, parents, etc.). So it was important to let that door close.
Instead, I have learned to be thankful for the many dreams that I have been blessed to have been able to see through. I know that is a tremendous privilege.
I hope that today you can focus on the life that you have; be present and thankful.
This is it.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance. — Psalm 16
