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I have been thinking a lot lately about what we mean when we say someone is successful.
Not the “Becoming President of my country” or “Being the richest person on the planet” or “Winning the Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer or an Oscar” type of success. I mean the regular, day-to-day, almost mundane and banal middle-class version of success.
How does that checklist go? Oh, yes:
Get a good education.
Find a good job.
Make money.
Buy a house.
Get married.
Have children.
Build a career.
Stay healthy.
Travel.
Be recognised for what you do.
Have good friends.
Take care of your parents.
Retire comfortably.
Grow old surrounded by people you love.
And, somehow, we decided that a successful life is one in which we manage to tick enough of those boxes.
The problem, of course, is that even within this mostly doable list of things that make up a good life, not all of us can get everything.
I was thinking about this recently while travelling in Europe, after meeting a couple who had been married for more than 40 years. We randomly met while waiting for a restaurant table, and seeing that I was on my own, they invited me to join them for dinner.
They had met when they were young, taken their time getting to know each other, married, had two children, built careers, bought a home, watched their children grow up and have families of their own, and now, in their 60s, they were travelling the world together. They were fit, healthy, deeply fond of each other, and seemed genuinely happy with the life they had built.
I looked at them and thought, This is an amazing life.
They asked me about mine. I told them about the business I started right out of college and eventually gave up because it got boring. I told them about the books I wrote, the film I wrote and directed, the travels that had by then taken me to more than 60 countries, my academic sojourn that ended with my getting a Doctorate, and the privileged life I now lead as a digital nomad that lets me work two jobs I love and travel the world at the same time.
And then, as people often do when they meet a woman travelling alone, they asked about my personal life. Was my family back home? Was I in Zagreb for work? When they learned I was single, they asked, “Didn’t you ever want to get married?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did. I just never found my person.”
There was no great tragedy attached to the answer. It was simply what happened.
The woman then looked at me and said, “I am so envious of you! Look at you! You are literally pulsating with energy and have such a glorious smile. You are so happy, vibrant, and have led such a wonderful life!”
And I remember thinking: But look at you! You have the person you met when you were young and with whom you are still travelling the world more than 40 years later. You have the children, the grandchildren, the home, the life you built together. You have created exactly the kind of life that, when I look at it from the outside, seems almost impossibly complete.
And yet here she was, looking at me and seeing something equally wonderful.
That stayed with me.
Because neither of us was wrong.
She was not secretly wishing she had my life, and I was not secretly wishing I had hers. We were simply two people looking at two very different lives and recognising something beautiful in the one we had not lived.
The fact is, I have never been married. I have never had children. I never found the person with whom I wanted to grow old. These were all entirely possible things in my life. I could have married. I could have had children. I simply made different choices, and life made some choices for me.
I was never willing to marry someone just for the sake of being married, or have children simply because that was what women were supposed to do. I wanted a particular kind of life, and that particular life did not include settling for a relationship that wasn’t right for me.
And what struck me about that evening in Zagreb, with a couple who were still crazy in love with one another after 40 years of marriage, was not that they had it all, or that I had somehow overcome the absence of these things. It was that I had stopped seeing them as absences in my life.
That’s the difference.
Because not all of us can have it all.
But that evening in Zagreb, when two strangers met, looked at each other’s lives, enjoyed learning about one another, and realized they had so much to be grateful for, they both thought the exact same thing:
I don’t have everything. But I have my everything.
~
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