Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.
There is a sense in which I am the author of this book, and a sense in which I am merely its first reader.
My father and I lack resolve, self-confidence, the willingness to impose ourselves on others, on a situation, on a set of circumstances, to step on things, to willfully forget our deficiencies, we are too self-aware to turn off that nagging internal critic, editor, co-author, to suspend our understanding that we are trying to do what we really have no business doing. We aren’t like the director. This man is someone for whom the world isn’t a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers, and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against it, don’t have any angle, any torque, no grip or traction or leverage. My father thinks success must be in direct proportion to effort exerted. He doesn’t know where or how to exert the least amount for the most gain, doesn’t know where the secret buttons are, the hidden doors, the golden keys. He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim. My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper. We make bullet points. We identify the key areas we need to research further. We try to figure out how to research those areas. We work in a vacuum. We work in his study. We ponder. We stare at our feet. We stare at the ceiling. We talk to each other, create a world. create a tiny, artificial, formal space, on a blank sheet of paper, where we can imagine rules and principles and categories and ideas, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual world out there. We don’t actually do anything. He writes things down, he crosses them out, he goes back and starts again. The world has always felt just out of his reach. The world of commerce, of men taking advantage of situations, of competition of sharp practice and words and elbows and speed, a world that was too fast for him. And yet my father will never stop trying, my father will go on for years after this day, thinking that if he just reads another book, just figures out the key, the secret, the world, the world of science fiction with its promise and its possibilities will open up to him, to us, for us.
But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.
Hitting the peak of your life’s trajectory is not the painful part. The painful day comes earlier, comes before things start going downhill, comes when things are still good, still pretty good, still just fine. It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn’t there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it’s all inertia from here, it’s all coasting, It’s all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it’s in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be, and earlier in your life, and also closer to where you are now, startling in its closeness.
I see myself at seventeen, already feeling nostalgia for being a kid his age, feeling the weight of all the bright Saturdays I spent in the dank garage instead of in this bath of sunlight and heat and blue and green, embarrassed for how little I had lived, how little my father had lived, wondering if it was something I would pass on to my son. This was the big day for my dad and I had woken up that morning amazed at the rarity of a day like today when we might come home champs, when we (my dad, me, our family) might get a win for once, but now, standing here looking at all of this, I remember how stupid I felt as I realized that for most of these kids, a day like this happened every weekend, that none of these kids thought of life that way, as a series of mostly bummer days with the occasional chance at getting a win against life. Who thinks that way? I was seventeen. Who thinks that way at seventeen?
I can allow the events of my life to happen to me. Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, and be assured of failure. From the outside, these two choices would look identical. Would be identical, in fact. Either way, my life will turn out the same. Either way, there will come a time when I will lose everything. The difference is, I can choose to do that. I can choose to live that way, to live on purpose, to live with intention.