Life’s greatest missions can feel way too routine

If there’s one constant in the human condition, it might be this: We value what we don’t have more than what we do have.

A case in point: For the past couple of decades, my wife, Carol, and I believed that nothing was more important than getting both of our kids through college.

This is not an uncommon lifetime goal here in the middle class. If there’s one thing we want to pass on, it’s a good start for our children.

So we worried, we saved and we made noble sacrifices for a new generation. OK, at least we worried.

“I don’t care what else happens,” we said to ourselves. “If we can only get those kids through college, our jobs will be done.”

And what then? We didn’t think about it. We figured we would just kind of fade happily away, mission accomplished.

So, about two weeks ago, we accomplished that mission. I hate to say it, but it felt sort of routine.

I’m not saying it didn’t feel good. I got teary-eyed at the big moment. By that, I mean when I paid the final tuition bill. Yeah, I also got teary-eyed when our youngest, Kate, walked up on stage and received her diploma from Western Washington University.

I’m just saying, it felt anticlimactic. It felt like a happy, proud step, that’s for sure. It felt like something that all four of us, parents and children alike, had achieved together. But it sure as hell didn’t feel as if life would now be happiness and bliss, and that our work here on this Earth was done.

And why did I even expect it to? I guess I just cling to this shallow notion of what constitutes success.

I remember once saying the following to my father: “You’ve done it. You raised three children to adulthood. You paid off your mortgage. You made it to retirement. Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve made it to the finish line. You’ve won the race.”

He looked at me like I was daft.

“You should be doing a victory dance,” I added, lamely.

All I can say in my defense is that, at the time, we were raising two little kids and had one big, hairy mortgage with 29.9 years still left on it. I couldn’t imagine anything more satisfying than enduring both.

He, of course, didn’t feel particularly victorious. In fact, he told me that those accomplishments felt, sort of, routine. Maybe he was thinking about all of the things he didn’t accomplish. Maybe he was thinking that he did only what everyone else had done – raise kids, own a house, have a career, retire, big deal.

Yet this is my point: Not everybody does accomplish this. Millions don’t (or haven’t yet) and they seem to be the only ones who truly appreciate these “routine” goals. They know that it actually means something to raise kids, help them through college and pay off a home.

So maybe what we should do is work a little harder to appreciate these “routine” accomplishments of life.

Let’s face it, being blasé about graduating your children from college is an insult to the millions who dream about it – and to those the dream will elude. After all, the number of Americans who graduate from a four-year college is about 26 percent.

It is not routine.

So why can’t we simply appreciate what we have when we have it?

Because we’re humans and we can’t seem to just accept happiness. Anyway, we always have one more lifetime mission to accomplish. For us, I suppose the next one is making ourselves productive members of society until we can get ourselves safely to retirement

Man, if we can just pull that off, I’ll be so eternally content.