Yachts or Applebees?
The great “extraordinary” question
So I’m curious about your thoughts on something. First, the background of how this came about. I was scheduled to be here in Minnesota this weekend for an area youth event that will happen tonight (Friday) and tomorrow. Then I’ll have the chance to preach at a couple churches Sunday morning before flying home that day and getting ready for work on Monday.
As those of you who live in the Midwest are aware, a pretty significant snow storm blew through on Wednesday and Thursday, forcing me to leave and head up here a day earlier than planned. By what can only be called the grace of God, I’ve largely gotten over my fear of flying – a fear that used to be paralyzing, but now, somehow, I actually look forward to it. Still, I will acknowledge that taking off Wednesday morning with the sound of ice chips from the sky peppering the cabin did give me a bit of pause.
Nonetheless I made it safely to the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, got my rental car, and started the 2-hour drive to where the event is taking place. On the commute, I flipped on the radio and, not knowing the area, began to scan the channels. Since I much prefer any kind of talk radio to music (I know, it’s weird), I just stopped on the first conversation I came to. Two guys were discussing a poem that had come across their Twitter feed, and it really hooked me. I remembered enough of it that I found the poem online once I got to my hotel…
“Do Not Ask Your Children to Strive” by William Martin
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
Okay, here’s the thing I think about humanity. I think we are inclined to hear something so eloquently stated that our knee-jerk reaction is just to say, “spot on, that’s great, exactly right.” Maybe I should be one of those people, but it’s not my nature. My first reaction is to say, “But wait, people who are striving for great things can also enjoy apples and pears along the way, right?” And I find myself sitting there thinking, “Wait, successful people don’t cry when their pets die? Those heartless monsters.”
But I think parsing it like that does a disservice to the general point that William Martin is making. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the issue being discussed here is contentment. Find contentment in life and you’ve actually lived an extraordinary life. In other words, as I listened to the guys on the radio talk about the beauty and wisdom of finding joy in the little things that are so easily missed when you’re “on the pathway to success and greatness,” my takeaway was something a bit different. To me, I think we need a reset on what we actually consider an “extraordinary life.”
Is it extraordinary to make millions, have mansions, fly anywhere at any time, rub shoulders with the world’s wealthiest, dine on yachts, and see the most spectacular parts of our world? I guess I can’t imagine anyone who has done those things saying it wasn’t. But is all that necessary to live an extraordinary life? The person that does those things likely hasn’t had the joy of mowing their own yard, building a deck with their son, gathering for game night with neighbors, or celebrating with the family at Applebees after a surprise bonus check came in from the boss. That all may be what constitutes an “ordinary life,” but depending on your perspective, couldn’t it be considered pretty extraordinary?
I’ll never do the things, have the resources, or find the earthly success that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs did. But in his final moments on earth, Steve Jobs was lamenting the lack of time he was able to spend with his kids, which he felt was “10,000 times better” than anything he did at work. I look at Steve Jobs and say, “Man, what an extraordinary life.” But he would have looked at mine and said the same. I think that’s the point that I want to take from this poem.
Flying into Minneapolis/St. Paul, I could see a million tiny houses below me, each representing unique, different, distinctive lives. The world would likely look at those nameless people and say “There – those are the ‘ordinary lives.’” But to whom?
In one of those houses is a teacher that is literally saving the life of a wayward student. In another one of those houses is a preacher who the Holy Spirit is going to use this week to convict the heart of a sinner and lead him to eternal salvation. In another one of those houses is a mom who frustratingly sets aside her grad school work to comfort a sick child and consequently teaches a lesson in priorities that will alter that young one’s life forever.
So maybe rather than teaching our kids not to strive for the extraordinary, it would be better if we all began realizing there’s nothing ordinary – in fact, there’s something divinely miraculous – about life itself.
ICYMI…
I wrote a few columns this week that ranged from philosophical debates like those over doctor-assisted suicide and what “makes a man,” to the political. If you’re interested, you can find them here:
Peter, my thoughts anticipated your conclusion a bit, as I read your response to the poem. I am of ordinary clevernous, and I neither mean to nor wish to lay low a sensible and truthful heart response, which you have eloquently laid out and supported. That being said, I was raised the son of a Friend (Quaker) with a note from his meeting supporting his gift of ministry, and great grandson of a Friend with similar gift, as well as grandson of a Nazarene pastor, nephew of Methodist, Nazarene, and Church of Christ pastors, and with all that I really learned very little: much less than I should have, about words. But as an engineer, I learned about statistics, and being blessed with a brother having an advanced degree in statistical medicene from Harvard, I've been forced somewhat to look closely at words that speak to ideas like "ordinary" and "extraordinary". For example, I think "ordinary" is a word that might also be described as usual or frequently occurring. Extraordinary, in similar fashion is simply "out of the ordinary, or "not ordinary", or rarely occurring. This lends itself then (if one might stretch one's perspective a bit) to the language of statistics: mean, standard deviation, median, and so forth. Without going into a more precise definition of each term, I suspect for many I've shriven the words ordinary and extraordinary of their emotional context, at least as much as a brief soliliquey might attain to. In this setting, there is no negative connotation to ordinary, and no positive connotation to extraordinary. There is only a word or two that speaks to the repetitive and mundane events (i.e. - usual or mean, median typs events) and the abberant events (i.e. - statistical fliers).
For an engineer, the fliers are "bad", and the ordinary are "good".
So coming back to the poem, I might simply suggest to change an intermediate conclusion a little.
From your note I might suggest also, "Find contentment in life and you've lived a good life". Fail to find contentment, and you probably have not." But since the Scriptures proscribe who is good, I might further ammend this to: you've lived a useful life. So maybe I use semantics to look at this with an engineering twist.
But in the end, we agree and you argue (I think correctly, but I elevate myself too much to imply I have any business thinking myself equal to you) that there is no reason to believe anything about life is less than miraculous. I worship a God of miracles... steve shields
Well said. It’s the “little things” that make life extraordinary. And being content and in the moment with those things. And the older I get the more I try to be in the moment and soak them all up.