Last week I went out in NY with Matt and a few friends. We hit one of the 500 small bars in the Lower East Side and spent three hours talking underneath a speaker blaring what appeared to be the same 10 songs over and over again. A great thing if you love Black Sabbath.
After a few drinks I got into a fairly involved conversation with a female friend of a colleague. She worked in hedge funds, and spent the first half of the evening telling us about the type of guys one typically finds in the industry. She told us all about her views on the antiquity of marriage, about the merits of pursuing a life based primarily measured by one’s bank account, about the impossibility of finding one person to complete your life, about the virtues of embracing the world in its carnal fullness.
It was a frustrating experience, because I’ve gone through it dozens of times before, in various bars in various cities. The professions change, the experiences change, but it’s like there’s a manual that people were mailed that never made it to my door. There are phrases and beliefs that these people share. And the problem is, they don’t actually believe it.
She listened to me talk about what a gift it was to meet my wife. I talked about how a man should treat a woman, about how she doesn’t believe in marriage because she’s never met a man (has never put herself in a position to discover a man) who showed her what is possible in a relationship. I talked about the things that should compel us to get up in the morning, about why I believed in a life of meaning and purpose.
As we talked, her Sex In The City / Boiler Room mentality receded into the distance. She talked about how difficult it is to meet a genuinely nice guy. She talked about how her career gives her a tremendous feeling of power, but that it’s not the same thing as fulfillment.
She agreed with me - but didn’t take the next step.
Couldn’t grasp that you’re not going to find the man of your dreams when you’re looking for the man of the next six hours. That you’re not going to find fulfillment and purpose if you’re focused on money for 80 hours a week.
It’s become a pattern for me when we hit the town - I inevitably get into what makes people (and myself) tick. We discuss the most important things in life…and then we stop. We realize that keeping that curtain perpetually open is extremely difficult, and that resolving to do so at 1:30 in the morning in a bar on Ludlow and Rivington is a proposition destined to fail.
It makes me sad. It’s not that I think I have some sort of answer to all the world’s ills (maybe just a couple.) But I feel as though I do know what it’s like to live without purpose. I feel as though I do know what it’s like to have a life driven by accomplishment, by the pursuit of the opposite gender. Pride, lust, fear, insecurity, envy…these have been the characteristics that have defined the majority of decisions I’ve made in my life. I’d go so far as to say that grace has given me the gifts of my life in spite of my character, not because of it.
Knowing what I know about myself, seeing what I’ve seen in the lives of my friends and family, knowing that there is a world out there that is absent so much of the pain and loneliness and hurt feelings and despair….it makes my heart ache when I meet someone who doesn’t believe in any of it. It hurts even worse is someone who does believe it, but bottles it up thinking that they can’t possibly live that life. That there are gifts and blessings that are beyond our wildest imaginations, but they’re excluded.
With all my talk, I know that I remain miles from that place. But I know it’s there, and I know we’re all included. And if my conversations at 1:30 in the morning resonate in any way with people like that girl I met last week, I wouldn’t be surprised to stand in front of the pearly gates and discover that my best work was done in those moments.
If only I had the courage to tell people they’re loved, they’re beautiful, they are not their actions, they are not the terrible things that have happened to them, they are not the decisions they’ve made in the past or will make in the future. If only I could tell people this when I wasn’t either inebriated or hiding behind a computer screen.
1 response
> “I’d go so far as to say that grace has given me the gifts of my life in spite of my character, not because of it.”
So true.