Is This Everything You Wanted, Now That It's Everything You Have?

[This essay was originally sent as part of our “Words for Your Wednesday” weekly email series on July 8, 2020. If you’d like to get reads like this one sent straight to your inbox, you can join the Windrose email community here.]

Is this everything you wanted, now that it’s everything you have?

This question haunts the intro of a song by singer/songwriter Noah Gundersen. At just 2 minutes and 16 seconds, the song is short but packs power like a summer thunderhead. I’ve listened to this song so many times in the last six months, and yet every time I hear it, it does that thing that all good songs do, making your heart feel like it just might burst from an inflation of emotion. 

Is this everything you wanted, now that it’s everything you have?

On the surface, yes. 

In those young, early-twenties years I spent working in an office, I longed for the flexibility to do work that I loved—to write—from anywhere. I wanted a schedule that wasn’t dictated by an arbitrary 8-to-10 hour societal expectation for productivity. I imagined myself scribbling in a notebook from a window seat 35,000 feet up on an ordinary Tuesday, finally freed from the constraints of limited PTO and a culture that side-eyes anything less than an overdriven work ethic. I pictured myself settling into my favorite coffee shop, tapping away on my keyboard as sunshine beamed across the table, dulling the memories of the months I had spent alone in a windowless office. I romanticized the idea of waking early in the predawn darkness, lighting a candle, and spending the hours wrangling words onto the blank page. 

These daydreams became realities.

Happy hours blurred into happy days blurred into happy months. 

Everything I wanted became everything I had.

I was comfortable.

Earth made its full rotation around the sun, we counted down the seconds to the new decade, and then an unseen pathogen burned through our resolutions, our hopes, our plans for the year.

This pandemic has gotten its grubby little fingers all over 2020. We’ve been stripped of our plans. Robbed of our routines. Stolen of our gatherings. Some of us have lost jobs, health, people. The wildfire grows. 

In my own life, this cruel stripping away of my plans, the removal of the distractions of a packed calendar, has created a clearing that the questions—Big Life Questions—have eagerly sought to fill.

Is this everything you wanted, now that it’s everything you have? 

I would prefer to avoid these questions, please and thanks. As life went on lockdown this spring, I did just that, flinging myself with an anxious energy into building my copywriting business, deeply fearful that any pause might be the catalyst to failure and a tumbleweed blowing through my bank account.

But my chaotic pursuit of productivity in order to quell the questions only resulted in a June dressed in stress, shame, and self-doubt.

So yesterday I finally surrendered to these questions that simply won’t quit, trading in my obsessive checking of email with the slow reading of a book, giving over my need for productivity for a simple exploration of the answers that these Big Life Questions might be trying to reveal. 

Is this everything you wanted, now that it’s everything you have?

...on the surface, yes.

But the questions always invite us to descend deeper.

Within the word question is quest—“a long and arduous search for something.” It’s a journey deep into the hard truth. On our quest we may discover answers that are terrible and terrifying, that make us squirm, make us angry, make us cry. 

During my afternoon of mocha-sipping, the questions continued their quiet interrogation.

Was this life that I had been living, pre-pandemic—a year full of happy hours and boarding passes and coffee shop days, my time spent building a business, writing sales pages, developing brand voices—a full life, or simply a full calendar? Have I been chasing a filled bank account instead of a fulfilling career? Have I confused my work of selling services for my vocation of telling stories?

Have I been living for comfort, instead of living for my calling?

Oof, I’m afraid my answers aren’t pretty. But they are important if I am to live a life that matters, that contributes, that serves. The seeking, however long and arduous, is necessary.

Might this forced clearing of our calendars, crumbling of our plans, quieting of our distractions be an invitation into an open-minded, grace-guided quest deeper into ourselves, a committed listening for whatever answers we may find?

Is this everything you wanted, now that it’s everything you have?

[Photo by Bruno Martins via Unsplash]

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