Finding Meaning in Life
My son, age 29, is living with me.
This arrangement has its attendant difficulties which are exacerbated by the fact that he works nights at a dead-end job that drives him up the wall. That means, among other things, that I have to try to be quiet during the day so that he can sleep. He pays his share of the expenses, does as little around the house as he can get away with, and feels that he is helping me out. Still, it is a mutually beneficial situation – for the time being.
I had an interesting conversation with my son yesterday. He had been trying to get to sleep without success because his mind was too active and when he asked me the question in the title of this article, I could see why he couldn’t sleep.
Why don’t people live the life they want? That is a question that is as appropriate for baby boomers, twenty-somethings, or kids just getting started in life. When my son asked the question, I went into teacher (or preacher) mode:
People don’t live the life they want because, very often, they don’t know what they want or what is realistic.
I pointed out to my son that I grew up in the “Father Knows Best”, “Leave It to Beaver”, and “The Donna Reed Show” era. He, of course, had never seen these shows and had to ask what I meant.
These half hour shows gave me, and hundreds of thousands others like me, a very idealized – one might almost say ‘Pollyannish’ – view of family life and life in general.
The people in these shows never encountered difficulties that couldn’t be solved in half an hour. They seemed to know their place in the family and in society – or if they didn’t know it, they only had to ask Father because, after all, “Father Knows Best.”
How realistic is that? Are all your problems solvable within a half-hour? And as for Father – I don’t know about you, but my father was a mechanic with dirty fingernails who cussed when he skinned a knuckle and liked to ‘mess around’ with his little girl.
It took me a long time to figure out that my father didn’t know best and that what he was doing – or had done, because that’s how long it took – was wrong.
Quite frankly, my life didn’t look like Donna Reed’s and I spent much of my youth thinking that something must be wrong with me. Maybe you’ve had similar feelings.
So, I told my son yesterday, we often have a distorted or idealized view of what life is supposed to be like and all we know is that we don’t have that kind of life. Sometimes that can inspire us to seek out that kind of life (by chasing a chimera), sometimes it can make us feel guilty, as though it is our fault that we are not living that kind of life, and sometimes it can blind us to the fact that we may have a perfectly good life even if we’ve got problems that seem unsolvable, even if “Father” didn’t know best, or even if our family didn’t “Make Room for Daddy” because Daddy was never there.
Why don’t people live the life they want? You might ask yourself that question. But maybe you’ll find it more helpful for ask yourself the question that my son didn’t ask himself or me: Why don’t I live the life I want?
