A Thirst for Gravitas

As I do every year during the Jewish High Holidays, I take a brief glance back at the year just past and I take a moment to figure out what I want to achieve in the year to come. This year, there is a new stirring in my soul. As I am 65 years old now and my head is full of gray hairs, I would like to think that I have become smarter and wiser than I was when I was 45 or even 50. But more than that, I would like others to recognize this quality of hard-won gravitas in me.

In my heart, I am not sure that I have earned that level of respect just yet. The truth is that our past precedes us. The mantle of gravitas must be earned over a period of many years. People judge us over time on our consistency and our track record in our professions over a long period of time. People who have moved from success to success to success during their lives gain such respect. People who have lived ethically throughout their lives get points for that as well. The other thing about a lot of individuals with gravitas is that they imbue their lives with a large dose of humility.

With respect to living ethically, no problem there. In part, I pretty well understood the difference between right and wrong from the getgo, although I stumbled from time to time, as most of us have. And in part, it was a healthy fear of getting caught, if I were to choose to cross the line. I really didn't want to pay the price for living recklessly. Living ethically was not the problem for me.

Neither was the matter of making humility a quality of my life. To my mind, an overweening ego is a real liability. People with big egos give themselves just enough rope to hang themselves. As the song goes, the higher the top, the longer the drop. I think I lost most of my ego in a really disastrous session of playing poker, to my best recollection.

But I do have an Achille's heel. For a very long time, I lived my life haphazardly. I wasn't very focused and not very consistent in the outcomes of my pursuits. I wasn't of those people who had a clear vision of what I wanted to do with my life. One year it was one thing and the next year it was completely different one. I would often joke that I could never fully figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up... and I was saying that well into my 50's. So there was no consistency from year to year in terms of the jobs I had or the career paths I took. They say that we learn from the things we do that don't work out. By that metric, I should have been the smartest of men in the world by the time I was 50. Well, I wasn't, because I just sort of drifted for a lot of years in my life, in search of who I was, where I fit into the world and what it was that I should be doing in my life.

Actually, knowing what I know now, I have already figured out that there are a lot of things, both material and virtual, that mean little or nothing in the larger scheme of things. I have learned that less is more and living a leaner life is infinitely better than the alternative. So I can take pride in that I am making some of the right choices and actions in the present. I just have to keep reminding myself that life is about the journey, not the milestones or the destination. Along the way, we are going to be evaluated and judged on how we conduct ourselves during the journey and on the outcomes of our efforts. My mantra now is that I am only as good as what I am doing today, and that critical bit of wisdom keeps me focused, committed and on course.

Needless to say, the jury is not quite ready to come to a verdict. The people who know me too well... like my wife and my kids... are not quite ready to grant me the mantle of gravitas I so crave. They are patiently waiting to see if I stay on track. I can't change my past. But the future has not yet been written. At least I am on my way and with a certainty headed in the right direction. Some lines from Sondheim say it all: if you know where you are going, you are already gone. If all things are equal, this time it will be a keeper.