Yellow Card

maybe getting old makes you more conservative.

A few mornings ago, I sat on a bench by the Albany Waterfront and people-watched cyclists, runners and hikers. Two missionaries from the Latter-day Saints church walked over and asked if they could sit. We talked about my own personal search for the truth, which is the kind of conversation I usually enjoy more than I admit. After a while, one of them pulled out a deck of cards. He asked me to pick a card and answer the question on it. My card was yellow. It said: “What is the meaning of my life?

I have argued about the meaning of life maybe twenty times. It is the crux of most of my (un)healthy debates with the people I am close to. But I had never actually been asked to answer it for myself. I had always been answering for everyone else.

After thinking for about 30 seconds, I found the first memories that came up in my mind really strange. What came up was my mother’s face during prize-giving ceremonies at the end of every school term. Every year I tried to be the best in my class because of the way her face would change when they called my name. It justified, in some private and probably unjustifiable way, all the hardship she had absorbed so that I could be in that auditorium at all. What came up was the year college got expensive and food at home got thin, and I quietly slid into the role of breadwinner. Eighty percent of my scholarships and side hustles went to making sure my family ate. My younger sister wanted to be a nurse. I now sponsor her at a private university that costs fifty times what my own college did and is, by every measure I can think of, twenty times better. What came up was my wife, and the small daily transactions of a marriage where two people keep choosing to make each other lighter in this world with a lot of heavy burdens.

For a long time I would have rushed past this to make a bigger claim. I would have said: we are here to serve each other. We are here to play our part in furthering the existence of our species. I have said versions of that in arguments for years. But that is not what actually surfaced for me on the bench. What surfaced was not humanity. It was my mother. It was my sister. It was my wife.

So let me be honest here: I do not believe in exceptionalism. I do not think my life means more than yours. But I also no longer believe the meaning of my life is service to humanity in some grand, distributed sense. I am not built for that scale. I have never lived the larger version, and I am not sure I ever will. What I have lived is a small, specific circle of people I have been entrusted with, and I have loved them. And I have loved them in the language I understand, which is service. Maybe one day my circle widens. Maybe a wider love is something you grow into, and I am earlier on the road than I think.

The missionaries gave me the Book of Mormon when we parted. I told them I would read it, and I will. I do not know yet what I believe about their god. But I think I left that bench with a smaller answer than the one I walked in with, and a truer one. The meaning of my life is the few people that I love wholeheartedly.