Living for the Weekend

So I’ve been thinking…

There is something profoundly sad about the comments so many of us make–myself included–like “thank God it’s almost the weekend.”  We discount the value of five of our seven days each week.  We are saying that we don’t appreciate 5/7ths of our lives.  And the truth is, most of us don’t appreciate it.

Why is that?  Is working so hard?  So bad?  I don’t know about you, but I don’t clean sewers for a living.  I’m not the guy in charge of executing the next prisoner on death row.  You’ll never catch me conducting a rectal exam.  No, I work in a really nice office.  My office mates are people that I would choose to have as friends.  Sometimes I get to do really meaningful work, like telling the story of an amazingly generous 14-year-old or empowering people to get involved in overthrowing some really bad piece of legislation.  I’ve gotten to meet some amazing people including the founder of Habitat for Humanity Millard Fuller.  I’ve ghost written pieces for the nation’s top newspapers.  I have a window office.

So why do I–and so many others–act as though we are just trudging through the week to arrive at two magical days called Saturday and Sunday?  Maybe it is because we resent that we HAVE to be at work each day.  If work was optional, maybe we’d be excited to come into the office.

Or perhaps we all just secretly resent that life didn’t turn out the way we had planned.  I know that I planned to be an academy award-winning actress who also happened to be President of the United States.  And Pope.  And a mom.  And independently wealthy.  So maybe the truth is that I can’t fully appreciate what I actually do for a living because it isn’t what I always wanted to do for a living.

My mother likes to say that the secret to happiness is to have an attitude of gratitude.  Don’t you hate it when your mother is right?

Can we all be exceptional at something?

So I’ve been thinking…

I’m good at a lot of things (not to toot my own horn, but toot, toot).  But am I really exceptional at anything?  I’m not so sure.  I know that I want to be.  I want to find that thing at which I am the Renoir or the Michael Jordan or the Thomas Edison.  But even if I found it, would I have the courage to pursue it?  I’m forty.  4-0. Somehow, while I wasn’t paying attention, I got old.  Okay old-ER.  But still.

People always say to do what you love.  But I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay me to sleep or read Jane Austen or watch Katherine Hepburn/Carey Grant movies or hang out with my dog.  Or eat.  Okay, someone COULD pay me to eat, but I’m allergic to fish so I doubt I could get a job as a restaurant critic.  Also, I don’t drink so I’d have nothing to say about the competence of the sommelier.

I’m lucky that I get to do something that I like to do.  And I’m good at it.  Some would say that I’m really good at it (again, toot, toot).  But am I exceptional?  Who’s to say?

Can you imagine what it would have been like to have been Thomas Edison when the whole electricity thing came together?  Do you think that Renoir knew that he was, well, RENOIR? And when do you think it first occurred to Michael Jordan that he was not just great, but THE BEST?

Perhaps I can move to Lake Wobegon–where all the children are above average.   Does that apply to forty-year-olds?