Note V — And Then What?

Notes from a Life I Was Not Promised — Note V

On ambition, the absurdity of achievement, and the unbearable question of what comes next.

I have always had a plan.

Or, at least, I have always insisted upon having one.

This, I once believed, distinguished me from those unfortunate people who wandered through existence without any particular understanding of what they intended to accomplish. I had goals, ambitions, deadlines, and an almost religious conviction that a man must always be moving toward something.

A man must progress, I told myself.

He must improve.

He must become more than he was yesterday.

And if he cannot become more, then at the very least he must not become less.

What a miserable philosophy upon which to construct an entire existence!

And yet I lived by it.

I pursued education, professional advancement, intellectual distinction, and the many other forms of progress through which modern society measures a successful life.

I do not claim that these pursuits were entirely noble.

There was vanity in them, certainly.

There was pride.

There was the desire to be recognized, to be respected, perhaps even to be admired.

But there was also genuine curiosity, pleasure in difficult work, and the sincere hope that I might contribute something worthwhile.

And yet, lately, a most disagreeable question has begun to trouble me.

And then what?

Suppose I accomplish everything I have set out to accomplish.

Suppose I obtain every qualification, reach every professional position, publish every work, and acquire every material comfort I once considered necessary.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that nothing prevents me.

What then?

Shall I finally be happy?

Shall I wake one morning and discover that the restless machinery of desire has fallen silent?

Shall I sit in a comfortable room, look upon the evidence of my achievements, and declare that my existence has been justified?

I suspect not.

Indeed, I know myself well enough to imagine what would happen.

I would celebrate briefly.

Perhaps I would feel proud.

Perhaps I would permit myself an evening of satisfaction.

And then, almost immediately, I would begin to think about the next thing.

Another objective.

Another challenge.

Another mountain.

Another future version of myself who, unlike the present one, would finally deserve to be content.

What a ridiculous arrangement!

I spend my life pursuing goals in order to become satisfied, yet the moment satisfaction becomes possible, I invent another condition for it.

I am like a man who constructs a staircase and, upon reaching the top, discovers that he has built it against the wrong wall.

But rather than descend and reconsider his direction, he simply begins constructing another staircase.

Higher this time.

More impressive.

Surely the view will be better.

I have begun to wonder whether ambition is sometimes less a pursuit of meaning than an elaborate means of postponing the question of meaning.

For as long as I have something to accomplish, I need not ask whether the accomplishment itself is worthwhile.

The work provides its own justification.

I must finish this because it is unfinished.

I must achieve that because I have not yet achieved it.

I must move forward because remaining still would be intolerable.

But why?

Why must I move?

Toward what?

For whose benefit?

And what shall become of me when there is nothing immediately demanding my attention?

Perhaps this is what I fear most.

Not failure.

Not even death.

But stillness.

The possibility of sitting alone with myself, without an urgent task to perform, and discovering that I do not know what to do with the person who remains.

I have often mistaken activity for purpose.

The distinction is easy to overlook.

Activity fills time.

Purpose gives time significance.

One may be extraordinarily active without possessing the slightest understanding of why one’s activities matter.

And one may live a quiet, apparently unremarkable life while experiencing a depth of meaning that no professional distinction could adequately describe.

Yet I have been trained, both by the world and by myself, to regard the first as evidence of success and the second as something almost suspicious.

What has he accomplished?

What has he produced?

What is the measurable consequence of his existence?

These questions are familiar to me.

I have asked them of myself for years.

But lately another question has begun to emerge beneath them.

So what?

I obtain another degree.

So what?

I publish another paper.

So what?

I earn more money.

So what?

I become more accomplished, more recognized, more successful.

So what?

I do not ask these questions because I believe education, scholarship, or professional achievement to be worthless.

Quite the opposite.

I ask them because they matter to me, and I wish to understand precisely how.

For there is a difference between something being valuable and something being sufficient to justify an entire life.

Work can be meaningful without being the meaning of existence.

Achievement can be satisfying without providing permanent satisfaction.

And ambition can be admirable without deserving absolute authority over every hour we are given.

Perhaps this is the distinction I have failed to make.

I have allowed the things I do to become the measure of who I am.

And when I am not doing something, I become uncertain of my own value.

How extraordinary!

A man may spend years cultivating his mind, only to discover that he has become incapable of granting himself permission to rest.

He may acquire freedom through hard work and then use that freedom to impose still more work upon himself.

He may escape one form of necessity only to invent another.

And all the while, he calls this progress.

But perhaps the problem is not ambition itself.

Perhaps the problem is the expectation that ambition must eventually deliver us from the ordinary conditions of being human.

We imagine that success will abolish insecurity.

That recognition will abolish loneliness.

That accomplishment will abolish uncertainty.

That sufficient progress will finally permit us to stop questioning ourselves.

But these expectations are absurd.

A successful man remains capable of suffering.

An accomplished man remains vulnerable to rejection.

A wealthy man may still feel unloved.

An educated man may still be profoundly confused about how to live.

And a man who has achieved everything he once desired may discover that desire has simply changed its object.

Perhaps there is no final arrival.

Perhaps human existence is not arranged as a journey toward a destination where every contradiction is resolved.

Perhaps there is no summit from which one may look down upon one’s life and finally understand why every difficulty was necessary.

This possibility frightens me.

For if there is no final arrival, then I cannot continue postponing the business of living until after the next achievement.

I must live now.

Not when the work is finished.

Not when the next goal is reached.

Not when the future has become sufficiently secure.

Now.

And what a terrible demand that is!

For living now requires something that relentless ambition has allowed me to avoid.

It requires attention.

Attention to the ordinary day.

To the people who exist around me.

To the body that carries me through the world.

To the quiet pleasures that cannot be entered into a curriculum vitae.

To the possibility that an afternoon spent doing nothing particularly useful may nevertheless be an afternoon worth having.

I find these ideas appealing in theory.

In practice, I remain suspicious of them.

There is still a voice within me that insists I should be working.

That I am falling behind.

That somewhere another person is accomplishing what I have postponed.

That time is passing, and I must have something to show for it.

Perhaps I shall never entirely silence this voice.

Perhaps I should not.

Ambition has given me much. It has carried me through difficult years and opened possibilities I once scarcely dared to imagine.

I do not wish to become indifferent to the future.

I merely wish to stop treating the present as an inconvenience on the way toward it.

And perhaps this is the true question beneath all the others.

Not what I shall accomplish next.

But what I am willing to consider a life worth living.

Would I consider my life worthwhile if I achieved less than I intended?

Would I consider it worthwhile if I were loved but not particularly distinguished?

If I contributed something small rather than something extraordinary?

If I spent more time with people and less time pursuing recognition?

If I reached old age without becoming the person I once imagined I ought to become?

I cannot answer these questions comfortably.

And that discomfort reveals something about me.

I have become so accustomed to earning my sense of worth through accomplishment that I struggle to imagine a worth that need not be earned.

But perhaps existence is not a trial in which I must continuously present evidence in my defense.

Perhaps I am not required to justify every year by producing something remarkable.

Perhaps the world will remain largely unchanged by my presence, and perhaps that need not make my presence meaningless.

After all, how much of what makes life beautiful can be measured through achievement?

A conversation that changes one’s understanding.

An unexpected kindness.

An evening of laughter.

The knowledge that another person feels less alone because one exists.

These things rarely appear in the formal accounts of a successful life.

Yet I suspect they are among the first things we would miss if they disappeared.

And so I find myself at an uncomfortable crossroads.

I still want to accomplish things.

Many things.

I still have ambitions that excite me, questions I wish to investigate, places I wish to see, and work I believe deserves to be done.

But I no longer wish to sacrifice the entire experience of living to the pursuit of a life that might one day appear impressive.

For what would be the point?

What would it profit me to reach the end of my ambitions only to discover that I had treated the years between them as something to be endured?

And yet, even now, I hesitate.

For perhaps I am merely inventing another goal.

To become content.

To learn to live slowly.

To discover meaning beyond achievement.

What if I turn even these desires into projects?

What if I begin measuring my progress toward peace?

What if I become ambitious about no longer being ambitious?

Ah, there is no escaping oneself so easily!

The mind is a clever prisoner. Give it a larger cell, and it will call the enlargement freedom.

Perhaps I must abandon the hope of resolving every contradiction.

Perhaps I may remain ambitious and uncertain.

Grateful and dissatisfied.

Independent and lonely.

Hopeful and afraid.

Perhaps these conditions do not disqualify me from living a meaningful life.

Perhaps they are simply part of the experience.

I am thirty-two years old.

I have lived away from home for much of my life. I have acquired certain things I once desired. I have survived years I was not sure I would see. I have spent birthdays alone. I have known the satisfaction of achievement and the strange emptiness that sometimes follows it.

And tomorrow, I suppose, I shall continue.

There is work to be done.

There are ambitions I have not abandoned.

There are people I have yet to meet and places I have yet to visit.

There is a future before me, though I no longer pretend to understand its shape.

Perhaps I shall accomplish something remarkable.

Perhaps I shall fail.

Perhaps I shall find a home.

Perhaps I shall remain a wanderer.

Perhaps I shall learn to love my own company without needing to convince myself that solitude is always preferable.

Perhaps I shall reach forty, fifty, or sixty and discover that I am still asking the same questions.

And perhaps that would not be such a terrible thing.

For I have spent so much of my life demanding answers from existence that I have scarcely considered the possibility that existence might not owe me any.

The questions may remain.

The ambitions may continue.

The years may pass.

But somewhere between the man I was, the man I have become, and the man I may yet be, there is an ordinary human life unfolding.

Not a project.

Not a race.

Not a problem awaiting its solution.

A life.

And perhaps I have been so preoccupied with determining what it ought to mean that I have forgotten to experience what it already is.

Still, I know myself.

Tomorrow morning, I shall probably wake and begin planning again.

I shall open my books, return to my work, consider the next objective, and persuade myself that this particular accomplishment will bring me a little closer to whatever it is I have been seeking.

And when I achieve it, if I achieve it, the old question will return.

And then what?

Perhaps I shall never be rid of it.

But tonight, for once, I do not intend to answer.

I shall allow the question to remain unanswered.

I shall allow the evening to pass without becoming useful.

And I shall allow myself to be thirty-two years old without demanding that the thirty-third year justify its arrival.

For I was not promised this life.

And yet it is here.

And so am I.

Still here.