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What Have You Accomplished?
PS: It has nothing to do with what you have done
Three months into the 75th of my life, 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. And there, I am asking a question highly unlikely to make me the life of the party: “Have I done anything of significance these past 75 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.
Nine months shy of 76, focused more, today, on the butterflies in my tummy than the ones that herald spring, I find myself looking in two directions at once. One is forward, trying to make out what I see with the time I have left. The other is backwards, trying to make sense of the forces that have brought me to this precise moment in time.
What I see, behind me, is my father coming home from a long day’s work. He’s exhausted, unsettled, my mother greeting him with a martini and the officiousness of a 50’s housewife, me tentatively approaching, receiving a quick hug and the all-too-familiar question my father routinely greeted me with: “What have you accomplished today?” — a kind of Zen Cohen that always left me feeling I hadn’t done enough.
Yes, I played roof ball and punch ball and kick ball and stick ball. And yes, I played with my dog and read the backs of my baseball cards. But did I accomplish anything? Did I do anything that really mattered?
The older I got, the more my father’s accomplishment mantra embedded its way into my psyche, a kind of microscopic parasite a person might…
