What drives you?

Assume, for argument’s sake, you’ve the means to live – food, shelter, common comforts. If not, first things first.

Assume, too, you are free to choose. Many are born into expectations they must satisfy. Opulent or spare, enslavement remains enslavement. Jeweled manacles are manacles even so.

Assume, too, you care to choose. Many live their lives without thought. They do what they must, like other creatures. Go with the flow, why perplex yourself?

You are standing at a crossroads. Which way? Your user’s guide contains no applicable instruction: you are on your own.

This circumstance is hypothetical. No one is wholly free. We must obey the demands of our moment and our nature, choose a track that’s been hacked or lose ourselves in the wood.

The freer we feel ourselves, the more human. Free means we can imagine different roads.

Younger, we’re likelier to be driven by expectations. Drive here means powered, steered, propelled. Hindsight shows me eager to please my parents (who could never be pleased). A lickspittle in public, I defied in secret, but no one cared. Society asked us to seem – not to be – good. Out of sight was out of mind.

Like most sons I followed my father while claiming not to, clinging to a myth of autonomy, declaring myself “my own man.” What pride in mimicry? To exist, we must best our forebears or, at least, revise.

I followed my father for my first sixteen years. Then he disappeared into the ground, disappointed with his lot, leaving me to fend for myself. I kept following him for the next thirty years, claiming not to, until his track vanished and I was truly on my own.

Now what?

Finding my way has been the story of my life. Free to choose means free to err. What did I want? What did I really want? I was driven alright, hurtling like a meteor, but in what direction? What did it mean to succeed?

What drove me, hindsight sees now, was the love of those I loved. I wanted them to feel glad for my having been. I wanted to bask in the warmth of their regard as those I’d loved basked in mine. I cared little for the cry of the crowd, only the fervor of the few. Let another love me as I had loved Thoreau, Bach, Shakespeare, my grandmother. Let my memory shine for them as a light in a window on a cold night.

The impossibility of my dream did not diminish its allure. Longing made that dream more luscious. I could not be good enough, sing sweetly enough.

That longing drives me still – powers, steers, propels. From that longing arises my moral code, as postulates from an axiom. There are still hard choices; often, hatefully, I ignore my own advice. But knowing where I long to go improves my chances of advancing in that direction.

For some folks, this conclusion may seem a truism, too obvious to recite. For me, finding my way was hard. Tawdry baubles tempted me: wealth, power, acclaim. The cadences of the General Confession looped through my dreams: I have left undone those things which I ought to have done; And I have done those things which I ought not to have done; And there is no health in me. The paucity of my accomplishments mocked the glory of my dreams. Absurd, this self-harassment – I should cut myself some slack. I tell myself this but I can’t. At the finish line, maybe, I’ll embrace myself: It’s OK, kid, you did your best.