Blue Sky

“Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.”
- Edward Hoagland

 
I’ve parked my scooter in the same location next to my front door for the last 2 and a half years. I pull into the driveway and then turn 90 degrees to the right – easy, convenient, and completely repetitive. A couple days ago, I almost wiped out for the first time a foot from my door because I forgot the first lesson everybody learns in riding: do not brake and turn at the same time.

It got me thinking about how careless I can get with the things that are important to me, and how the end of something can often be traced back through multiple obvious steps. My first mistake was pulling into the driveway too fast. My second was still thinking I’d get the turn fine. My third was braking hard mid-turn because I realized I was still accelerating too fast. Luckily I was going slow enough that I was able to prevent myself from going down. But the feeling of WTF was quickly replaced by, “I’m a damn idiot.”

The same principle applies across so many scenarios though, like relationships, health and work. The minute you begin letting up in care and focus is the pivotal moment in hindsight. Take the person who’s quit smoking for 5 years and then starts again. From the surface, you can’t understand how or why that would ever happen. But they already quit for so long!, you think. And yet, it’s so seductively easy to fall under the spell of thinking you can control things instead of working to manage them. You can have just one cigarette because you’ve already quit, right?

We enter a milestone-driven culture the minute we’re born: first word, first day at school, first kiss, first degree. And then we’re suddenly ejected at our last graduation. Now what? We begin creating our own milestones because it’s the only thing we’ve ever known. I have close friends who are extremely intelligent, driven, and have very clear goals. Their goals include wanting to make 10 million dollars (a number reached through thoughtful calculation), getting married within the next 5 years, getting into a top-tier school for their MBA, and finding true love (you know who you are, my dear!).

I admire people who have this type of drive and foresight because I’ve never been able to know what I wanted very far into the future. I like what I like now, I suppose. And yet, I’m also skeptical that many long-term goals can truly be as fulfilling as the anticipation. We talk about goals as if they’re binary, but doesn’t the satisfaction of achieving a goal decrease over time unless you constantly watch it? Every goal seems to have a reverse path: marriage -> divorce, lose weight -> get fat, make money -> lose money.

Isn’t the natural order to slide into reverse if you stop tending to the present? Yes, you graduated from college, but what did you learn? You got married, but did you take care of your spouse and yourself? You exercised and dieted off the extra 15 pounds, but are you still exercising and watching your diet? Or, for me, I learned to ride a scooter and then, 3 years later, I forgot the first lesson.

It’s not that I don’t believe in goals, but I don’t trust goals as a measure of happiness. When I was in high school, I worked very (or, sorta) hard to be a good Asian-American daughter who did well and got good grades. And, as all Asian-American kids know, the pinnacle of your high school success is measured by your SAT score. So I worked really, really hard because I wanted to get a great score that made my parents happy. And the crazy thing is that I did really well. So I called my parents from my dorm at Milton and told them the happy news. They responded with joy and elation. But I felt nothing, or rather, I felt intense disappointment. It was a really eye-opening experience for me, and I’d have to say that it’s shaped a large part of my life and my philosophies about happiness.

You might ask what this has to do with never being too old to be happy. I would answer that I’m not quite sure, except that I’ve had long conversations with friends lately who find themselves unhappy with where they are in life. Yet, from everything I know about them, they are some of the most intelligent, kind and accomplished people I’ve ever met. It doesn’t compute to me. I would prefer the concept of a happiness that is not contingent on an achievement, a happiness that I expect to ebb and tide because isn’t that just how life really goes anyway? So I’m trying to think more about what I have and what I need, and less about what I don’t.

I went to a fantastic talk by Hartmut Esslinger recently, where he spoke about his career as a designer, and he said many things that resonated with me. I’m paraphrasing poorly, but when asked about what products he likes, he named the iPhone because you can readily see that a lot of care went into creating it. The idea that care and attention to detail can be a manifestation of love is one that really resonates with me. I think it’s also what makes the difference between being good at something and being great at it. Anyone can create a prototype, but it’s the follow-through that counts. And the reality is that we can only care and focus on so many things at once, and anybody who says differently is super-human, lying or deluded.

I’d rather have a smaller life paying great care to the people and things I love than a larger life that misses out on those moments that can only come from time, depth and awareness. Being in San Francisco and surrounded by amazing talents, it’s easy to get caught up on everything you haven’t done yet. This city is like none other, and that’s both a great and terrible thing.

I have no deep thought to leave you with, so instead I’ll just tell you a few of the things that have made me happy this past weekend: had empanadas and a beer sitting outside with a friend on a warm San Francisco evening, drove solo down the coast to Pescadero and laid out in the sun with a cool breeze and a fantastic book (<– photo), ate a yummy meal at Maverick with friends and many laughs (admittedly, some of them uncomfortable), met a bunch of new people excited about the future of education and working on their own ideas of how to make it better, and received a sweet message from a great friend I’ve made in the last year. Pretty awesome for just a few days, eh?