A goal

 The day after I wrote my post about self-esteem, I had an idea. I didn't have time to write it up here, so I scribbled it down for later. Well, now it's later.

Over the years I have written a lot about goals: how I don't have any, how I don't work towards them, how maybe I don't even want them. And as evidence I look at how my professional life has been … undramatic, and how I don't feel that much pressure to change it. I do my job well enough, I guess; but my performance apparently isn't exciting: good enough that people are glad to keep me at it, but not so glowing that they want to move me on. And I've talked about my envy of my classmates from high school or college, who were always so much more directed and focused than I was, and who therefore ended up achieving so much more. You've heard these stories too often.

But the idea I scribbled down was, What if I really did have a consistent goal all along and just didn't recognize it? Is that possible? Sure, I guess. Why not? I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. And on that reckoning, it is clear that my goal has consistently never been to become rich or to join society's power structure. Every time I have faced a fork in the road where one path would take me closer to membership in the power elite, I've chosen the other.

My high school was a private prep school — the same one Son 1 attended — many of whose graduates go on to great things. But when it came time to select a college, I turned down the chance to go to Harvard in favor of a small liberal arts school that no-one at my high school had heard of. At the time my reasoning was that of course Harvard was a great school, but I wasn't so concerned with burnishing my intellectual credentials. What I wanted was to improve my anemic social skills; and I had decided — on the basis of woefully inadequate data — that the school I chose would be better for that. I mean, it was and is a highly intellectual school in its own right too, even though it doesn't labor under the heavy Harvard name. And I met Marie there, so that part worked out.

After college I applied to graduate school in a field that would have left me set for life. I applied to the two best programs in the country, got into one of them, … and then dropped out before classes started. Of course, I had just met Wife a month before (although naturally she wasn't my wife yet!) so perhaps the thrill of having a girlfriend that I was regularly fucking was just a bit more enticing than graduate school.

The year after that, Wife and I went off to graduate school together: different school, different program. This time the program wasn't necessarily one that would have kept me employed, because it was for the most part more academic and the academic job market was starting to dry up in those days. (Though to be fair it was nothing like as bad as it is now.) On the other hand my advisor was famous throughout the field — some might have said infamous — and he knew everybody. The likelihood that I would have made good contacts to put my degree to work was very high. But after two years there, Wife left; I spent the summer thinking about it and then dropped out to be with her, saving my marriage but abandoning my program and whatever opportunities it could have given me. 

Do you see the pattern? The unchanging goal common to all those decisions? I wanted relatedness far more than I wanted greatness. I wanted to stop being a rock or an island; I wanted intimacy, both sexual and emotional; I wanted to be a good father and a good lover and a good husband. That's the goal, perhaps the only goal, that I have followed consistently through all these years. I've made huge mistakes. But when I make a mistake in this area, I come back and try again.

Have I hit my goal? I've done well enough. 

• My marriage finally fell apart, but I worked hard at it for thirty years. 
• My sons appear to be transitioning into adulthood relatively smoothly. Doubtless I screwed up any number of things as their father, but they have proven resilient enough to bounce back anyway; and for that I am grateful. 
• I have an ongoing sexual relationship with Marie, and emotionally intimate friendships with both Marie and Debbie. 
• Looking wider afield, I'm not rich but I guess I'm doing OK. I have a job at which I am good enough that several people tried to urge me to accept the transfer to Sticksville before I finally did so. 
• I have neighbors here whom I enjoy, all of whom are sad that I'm going to leave in a few months. 
• I'm in touch with a couple of other people from college (such as Inga), and at least one from an earlier job (the ex-colleague I mention here). 
• I'm still no social butterfly, but I'm not a rock nor an island.

Maybe now I can stop moaning about not hitting any goals. What I've learned from this is that I can't just set any arbitrary goal and expect to work on it. But that's very different from saying I've never had any goals at all.