What Have I Accomplished?

When taking stock is more about the TAO than the DOW

Now that I am 77, I find myself at a curious crossroads — the intersection of who and what, one of those strange intersections far out of town where the sagebrush rolls and the GPS signal is just out of range.

Sitting in my kitchen, wondering how I gained the last five pounds, I ask myself a question highly unlikely to make me the life of the party:

“Have I done anything of significance these past 77 years?”

It’s an age-old dilemma, methinks, a classic rite-of-passage — the time when a man takes stock of himself and realizes his so called “portfolio” of accomplishments doesn’t necessarily measure up to what he imagined it would one day be.

And though I have always felt a breathtaking magnificence inside me, outwardly much of what I have expressed in this life seems to have been lost in translation — not unlike a child’s game of “telephone” where you whisper something to the person next to you and they, in turn, whisper it to the person next to them and so on and so forth around the circle until the last person blurts what they’ve heard — a jumble of words not even remotely close to what it was the started the whole game.