Dean's World

Industrial Bill (a.k.a. "IB Bill") has asked the following:

I'd like you to write a short essay, no sources, and you can be as flexible as you like, revealing as little or as much as you see fit: What/who matters most to you — and why? That's probably what we're all thinking about right now.

What matters most to me? On the surface, this would seem an easy question. Were I inclined to take the question unseriously, I would throw off a half-dozen simple answers. And the truth is, those simple answers would not be simple things: Security. Stability. The esteem of my peers. Self-esteem. Challenges enough to make my life interesting but not so challenging that I cannot overcome them.

Would we not all assent to such answers? Maslow's hierarchy of needs would seem to describe most of us, would it not?

Within that, there are also the little things that seem to matter to most of us: whether our favorite sports team does well. Whether our children do well in school and make us proud--and are happy. Whether we're good lovers in bed. Whether we smell bad. Whether our favorite movie does well at the box office. If we are religious, whether God is pleased with us. If we are not religious, whether we have left our mark, however small or subtle, upon the human race.

To an extent, Bill's question is the easiest possible to answer. I'd say that if I'm making a good and secure living, if I'm doing good in school, if my wife and children love me, and if people enjoy reading my scribblings here on this weblog, then I'm measuring up to everything that's important to me.

But if we were not inclined to take it unseriously, Bill has asked me the most difficult question that can be asked of a human being.

We go through this life doing our best to survive and, if we're lucky, to thrive. None of us are perfect, and none of us measures up to everything we would like to be. I am not a baseball fan--in fact, unlike most male humans, I am not much interested in competitive sports--but I often think that American baseball is a wonderful microcosm of life as an ordinary human. For let us just look at baseball: in this sport, failure is far more common than success.

No? You doubt me?

Baseball is a study in failure. If you are one of the greatest who ever played the game, you might have a batting average of .333--which would mean that out of a thousand times at bat, then 666 times out of a thousand you failed. Perhaps you didn't swing, or if you did swing you whiffed it: you missed, you batted a foul, or you hit the ball but were called out. Ultimately, you failed. Yet if you failed only 666 times out of a thousand, you would be counted among the greatest athletes who ever played the game.

Robert Browning said, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" I think of that often as I go through life.

So what's important to you? Mostly, you can only answer that for yourself. If you're a believing man, it'll be between you and God--but it's still a question only you can answer. Ultimately, it's still up do you.

Yet to bring this to a very personal level, I will say this: Before September 11, 2001, I had a lot of answers to this question of what is important, most of them self-indulgent. After it, with much contemplation, I was forced to bring such a nebulous question into sharp relief:

What is important to me?

What is most important to me is my wife and my children. They are my reason for living, my reason for existing. If I have done my duty to them as best I could, then I have truly been a man. I need no further justification for anything I do.

But beyond that, I often think of something that James Joyce said: "'This race and this country and this life produced me,' he said. 'I shall express myself as I am." One of the best writers in the blogosphere has taken that as her byline, and I wish I had been so wise as to make it mine. "Defending the liberal tradition..." does not say it half so well.

Beyond myself and my many failures and my few successes, there comes my chosen family: my beloved wife and my unbelievably amazing sons Draco and Jacob. If there is a God, he let me know he exists by giving them to me.

But at a higher level comes this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

That is a statement of what it is to be an American. But it is also a statement of the best aspirations of the human race.

And right now your fellow Americans--and your fellow human beings--need your help. Right now.

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This essay was written due to the generosity of Industrial Bill. For a donation of $50 or more to the Red Cross, I'll write an essay on any subject--any subject you wish. So what are you waiting for, punk?