Growth

The first time somebody asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I was in first grade. I wish they hadn't asked. It's such a limiting thing to ask a little boy, it implies that he should have an idea already. I think it's meant to be cute; people ask the question expecting "fireman!" or "astronaut!" and then they can laugh at the silly little boy.

But I thought about it, I thought really hard. I wanted to give the right answer, I didn't want to lie, because then if I grew up and didn't become that thing I had said, the question-asker would remember and they would think I was a liar.

I remember my dad's father ("Daddy Bob") had arthritis in his hands, so they were very gnarled and his fingers looked like they were always causing him pain. I didn't think it was fair that he had to have pain in his hands, because he was such a good man. I wanted to help him. Dad told me there wasn't a cure for arthritis. I thought that wasn't fair that there should be a sickness that doesn't have a cure, it should be against the rules. So the next time somebody asked me what I wanted to do, I said "a doctor, so I can cure arthritis so my Daddy Bob's hands won't hurt anymore."

Daddy Bob died two years later, when I was nine years old. I cried a lot. I had never known anyone who had died before and I missed him because he read me stories and played bingo with me. I felt like I let him down because I wasn't old enough to cure arthritis yet and now I couldn't ever help him.

Obviously, I never became a doctor. I didn't even want to be one, I just wanted Daddy Bob's hands to stop hurting.

This was my first lesson in writing a future that probably won't happen. I still do it. I get excited about some possibility, I see a wonderful future and I fill it with details big and small. I did this before I came to Baylor and lots of it came true. I did it before I moved to New Orleans and less of it has come true. I'll probably do it for the rest of my life (see, there I go again). We take the things that are behind us in the past, add them to the decisions we're making in the present, and we use them to write a future that could possibly happen based on those decisions.

But that's not how life works. We don't get to see how it ends, we only get to watch the next thing unfold one day at a time. We can move toward a goal (or not) and we can pursue something we want (or not), but focusing on our future is what pulls us out of what we're creating for ourselves right now. We're not smart enough to see the future, and we can't make our decisions based on what might or might not happen. All we can do is focus on the things that we want, right now, in this very moment, and do what we can to move towards them.

For some people this means creating safety for their child, so they go to work and they earn money that will go to the kid's braces and college tuition. For some people this means finding a person to love, so they go on dates or go to bars. For some people this is as simple as calling out for pizza. At some point in our lives, we'll all be or have been the person who is searching for one of these things.

As a kid, all we're ever expected to think about is what we want right now; kids are called "the future" but that's just us projecting our hopes onto them. Kids, when they're not misbehaving, are being in the moment, playing on playgrounds and building adventures in their mind. Asking a kid what they want to be when they grow up is asking them to grow up a little in their mind, or at least that's what it did for me. I don't want to make a kid think about that, so I don't ask them questions like this. Instead I try to get them to tell me a story.