The Wrong Room

I was sitting in a packed auditorium of 2,000 hopeful people. The lights dimmed, and everyone held their breath as they waited for the headline speaker to take to the stage. Somewhere in the middle of their keynote, as the speaker began talking about how to ‘get ahead’, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was in the wrong room. Not because I didn’t want to learn. But because nothing they said seemed to describe the life I wanted to live.

Lately, I’ve noticed a particular kind of message burrowing its way deep into our cultural narrative. You might be behind, but you are not too late. Trust the timing of your life. Success doesn’t have an expiry date. A kind of reassurance that your shot at ‘success’ is just around the corner, that your turn is over the next horizon, it’s not a matter of how, only a matter of when.

I don’t doubt the well-meaning intention behind these messages. Hope is necessary. But I’ve been sitting with the question the message leaves unanswered.

Arrive where, exactly?

Somewhere along the line, we’ve absorbed the idea that a successful life, well lived, has a destination. That there is a moment – a role, a number, a moment of recognition when things will finally fall into place, and we will feel like we always imagined we would when we got there. And so we wait. We work toward it. We reassure one another that this state is possible somewhere in the not-too-distant future.

What we talk about less is the cost of embarking on the journey. Or whether, when we get there (wherever there is), the view will be what we expected.

The sense of fulfilment has a different texture from the feeling of being a success. It doesn’t arrive in moments of triumph, but in ordinary ones. When you catch the sweet scent of apples as you’re lifting the freshly baked pie you laboured over from the oven, or in a conversation when you’re really listening to someone. It doesn’t translate into a metric or a milestone. It’s easy to miss entirely if you’re scanning the horizon for something more tangible.

You cannot chase contentment. It does not announce itself. You can only notice it, often after the fact.

Our culture has no scorecard for either of these states.

So, maybe the question isn’t how to come from behind, or the challenge isn’t whether we’ll arrive. Maybe the better question to sit with is whether the destination we’ve set out a course for was the one we chose. Is this story the one we really want to live into?

A life oriented toward fulfilment looks different from one oriented toward success; it involves making choices and weighing up the compromises we’re willing and unwilling to accept.

Back to the conference, where, at the interval, I left the auditorium and walked out of the dimly-lit conference centre into dazzling sun.

Sometimes, with the best will in the world, you end up in the wrong room. But just because you arrived there doesn’t mean you have to stay.

*PS: Dear Friends and Supporters,
I’m taking a three-week break from posting. I’ll be back writing to you in June. Until then please feel free to comment, connect with others and visit the newsletter archive.

Image credit: Mitchell Luo