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In my younger days, I figured I’d reach a point in life when I’d reach Enlightenment, or at least a point where things began to make sense. Then, I got to a certain point in life and realized that the finish line kept moving farther into the distance. Someone kept moving my cheese!

It was then that I realized that I wasn’t chasing a finish line but a mirage. There was no finish, much less a line. The closer I got, the farther away “Enlightenment,” or whatever I was chasing, would move.

When I was a competitive runner in high school, Nike had a poster that I loved. It was a simple photo of a runner heading down a long road. The caption at the bottom read: “There is no finish line.”

I was all of 17 at the time, but I probably should’ve taken a clue from that poster. Indeed, there IS no finish line. You never finish one challenge, and that’s it; you’re done. There’s always something else—another goal to chase, another mountain to climb.

You finish one race, meet one challenge, achieve one goal, and it’s on to the next. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when you stop learning, you stop growing, and when you stop growing—well, I don’t even want to go there.

The way I look at life is simple. I want to be better today than I was yesterday. I want to be a better writer, husband, friend, son, brother—whatever—than I was the day before. If I can look at myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say that I did that, it was a very good day.

If I can’t say that, I’ll have to work that much harder tomorrow to meet that goal. Life isn’t a straight line. Like all of us, I have good days and bad days. I have challenges and hurdles- in my case, depression and ADD. Sometimes, those hurdles seem insurmountable, and sometimes, they’re manageable—but they’re always there.

If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.

- Maya Angelou

When I learn of someone who’s given up the fight and taken their own life, I’m saddened because I have to stop and think about the times when I was in that kind of dark place. That could’ve been me. That it wasn’t is something I’m forever thankful for.

I was fortunate. I had friends I could reach out to when I needed help. There were people in my life who made me promise to call them if things ever got bad enough that I’d consider taking my life. Now, I know I have too much to live for, so the lows don’t seem so low, though they still come around occasionally.

I’ve spent a lot of time working on being proud of who and what I am. On the surface, I’m a pretty generic White Heterosexual male. There’s nothing particularly unusual or noteworthy about me, but I have some talents and some things I’m good at. I have people in my life who love me and whom I cherish, and though I’m a confirmed introvert, I’m by no means an island.

I like people (conceptually, if not sometimes in reality), albeit in small groups. If there is a Hell and I end up in it, it will likely be a shopping mall at Christmas time. Then again, by that time, everyone will be doing their shopping online, so perhaps Hell won’t be so bad after all.

I’m probably not destined to change the world with broad brush strokes or sweeping sledgehammer blows. If I change the world, which seems unlikely (but I won’t rule it out), it will be through patiently nibbling at the margins with a rubber mallet. It will be with my words, which given the volumes of words being spilled in various forms and formats these days, makes effecting change of any sort seem virtually impossible. Still, a boy can dream, no?

I used to think I wanted to accomplish something grand, to leave a mark that would cause people to remember my name. As I got older, though, I began to realize how hard it is for one person to do that. Most of us come and go, little noted nor long remembered once we shed our mortal coil.

That’s not me being morose; that’s just the truth. With three billion-plus people sandwiched together on this rock, the odds of one person doing something genuinely remarkable and memorable are remote. The best most of us can hope for is not to fuck things up to the point where we’re remembered for creating a major disaster—like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or the next Holocaust.

Everything is hard until it becomes easy.

- Bill Walton

There’s an old Native American proverb that says the wise man plants a tree whose shade he knows he will never live to enjoy. I’ve always liked that idea—not just making things better, but making things better for generations to come, those who will come long after we’re gone and will never know whose work they’re benefitting from.

I don’t know that I will ever write my heart-breaking work of staggering brilliance that will shake the intellectual foundations of the world as we know it. I want to think I have that book in me, and perhaps I do. But if I were to leave this world without producing that, I think it will carry on just fine.

More than anything, though—even more than I might want to be renowned or well-remembered—I wanted to be remembered for being a good person, for being kind and compassionate. To paraphrase something Maya Angelou once said, people will forget what you said and/or did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

I hope that people will remember me for making them feel good and putting a smile on their faces. If that’s my only legacy, I’ll take that.

At this point in my life, I think I’ve learned a thing or six about living. One thing I’ve noticed about people—mostly because I’ve been guilty of it myself—is that they spend so much time focused on the past or worrying about the future that they forget to live in the present.

You can’t change the past; the future will always remain unknown. All we have is the present moment—right here, right now—to live in, and if we’re focused on the present or the past, when will we live?

So, my challenge to myself these days is pretty simple—focus on being kind to others and being more present in the moment. Kindness can be a challenge given some of the people I write about, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be better. I do. It’s just that I recognize how much and how often I fall short of the target.

I can do better.

That’s OK, though. I’ve heard perfection is pretty boring.

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