50 – American Dream

I have a brick house with white siding, it is almost like a white picket fence. I am fifty years old and have a beautiful wife, two beautiful children (until they open their mouths) and we all have a car, a phone and a bedroom where we can go and consume our own content. That is the American dream, right? We have one meal per weak at the kitchen table together after church on Sunday and we usually enjoy each other while on vacation, or at least we are willing to go on vacation together.

I have acquired enough, but it is my nature to want more. I have a robust retirement account, a real estate portfolio that will be paid for soon and enough toys and junk. I like where I live – sure I could use a pool and an addition for my wife’s art studio, a sauna and a cold plunge and I will figure that out over the next couple years, but have I designed a meaning for my life, a purpose. I am writing to find that path to meaning, to explore where I want to go and to learn from where I have been. I am comfortable where I am – being present and with the ones I love. Sure, I grab the phone quite often, but I also have no problem leaving it in my room from Friday to Sunday night with as little attention as possible. The phone and entertainment are my two heaviest distractions as I can get into about any live sport, which must be a thing because there is a ton of it available. They even have Pickle Ball TV now – I already watch hours of it on YouTube. I do derive real joy from watching beautifully crafted stories on television – I have most every streaming service and am in love with awesome storytelling. But I am not stuck in a groove in my couch, if I receive a call to participate in the world, I am up and out to dinner, or a concert, a pickleball game or a walk with my wife.

The sad thing is that my vision board is empty and it has been staring at me for several years. My wife made me four beautiful backgrounds on canvases that are on the wall in my room and are designed to be the backdrop for my vision board – the rest of my family has created precise visual scenes of what they are striving to be. I have gotten as far as putting a picture of my family on one of the canvases, a writing quill and an actual wooden cross are also up there and then four words that I wanted to use for themes for each canvas – Humility – Kindness – Gratitude – Organization.

I lost a job that I had for ten years because a combination of lack of humility and kindness. I was really good at this particular job and had created a territory in the southeast that went from one of the weakest in the country to one of the strongest while also staying in the top five of growth for all the years that I served as a territory manager. This was the same company that gave me a chance as a felon and that I was always grateful to, but I had lost the sense of gratitude and replaced it with a sense of pomposity as I created a more vibrant business in my territory that I thought was based on my personal relationships. I achieved growth percentages each year that made my bonuses life changing and I equated the money to status in the company and let my head grow bigger and bigger. I raised my voice often at our internal staff and built a character that was just based on winning at all costs – I would run over anyone to win and sometimes I needed those people my feet had just trampled over. The shame I felt after being fired during the very pinnacle of my performance was intense. Not only had I lost my job, but my family and I were going to take a six month hiatus once I was paid my bonus for the year and go to South America and ingrain ourselves in Latin culture in hopes of becoming fluid speakers of Spanish as well as resetting as a family. This dream was crushed on the day that I was fired. I had lost my humility and gratitude and raised my voice at a superior with some choice words included and I had been given what I deserved, a wake up call.

Gratitude is much more that just being thankful to an employer for giving me a chance, it is most acutely felt when I envision my wife. She is what I am most grateful for. I describe her as a saint – which I know is a loaded term in the theological sense – but it fits my wife and her mother. They lead with kindness and a genuineness that I perceive as strength. I am also very grateful for my children who have created something for me to care for more than myself. Our family unit is something special and if I can not acknowledge that each day, be grateful, then I am doing something wrong. A job takes care of the family unit, but losing one made me see them much clearer – they are what matters more than where I travel each day to make money. A very important lesson that I learned from being axed was that I needed to develop humility at work and gratefulness at home.

Kindness was something that I had also let slip with rage simmering all the time as I beat everyone in my path to submission trying to win the game of life. I learned it is not a game at all, it is a dance. Sometimes you have to listen to connect with the tune and sometimes it is a heavy metal thrashing and you have to explode your physical self to release the energy of loss. The song can be unbelievably sad, the constant suffering of the human condition can lead to giving up on the dance, but you have to make it through the suffering to get to the joy. Kindness to others in the key to moving forward. I don’t like everyone I meet in this world, but if I can show them kindness, I am allowed to move on – anger gets me stuck.

Organization is my last vision board theme and someday I will create images to go with these words and the vision board will take form, but I am not organized enough with my time and space to get rid of the clutter and make room for the inspiration. My house is cluttered, my car is cluttered and my mind is cluttered, but I am comfortable in this chaos for now. I believe the mind needs to come first and the physical world will follow. Can I quite my mind enough to allow the images of my desires and aspirations to come forward?