Making mark in world

Goethe, golf, signifigance

We know what we are, but we know not what we may be. —William Shakespeare

When my father suffered a near fatal heart attack at age 39 while on a business trip in Baltimore, my mother flew there to be at his side while his life hung in the balance. When she arrived at his bedside in the emergency room, he grasped her hand, his eyes full of tears and said, “I can’t die now. I haven’t made my mark in this world yet.” Like most men of his generation, he had been encouraged to find meaning in his life through business achievement and that life should have a significance that, at age 39, had apparently eluded him up to that point. He wanted to be great by the way the world defines greatness.

When he returned to work, it became clear climbing the corporate ladder any higher was not an option, so he began working on a series of potential inventions that would do the trick. Before he died at age 51, his big idea was to invent a soda can that would expose a straw to sip your drink through when you pulled the pop top. I would like to think, that when he felt his life leaving his body that sunny afternoon while he was lining up a putt on the 18th hole, he did not feel the same way he did, that he saw the world in a different light.

The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his play Faust wrote, “All that is mortal is but a symbol.” The question for me is, what symbols do we look for when searching for meaning in life? Many of us have things we think we want, but only have a very vague understanding of what we desire. This often leads to great unhappiness when we allow the world to tell us who we are and what we should be doing. We then proceed to try to find purpose with a fury which can cause us to totally ignore what is in front of us.

When our ardor for significance cools at times, we can see its meaning in meaningless. One characteristic of art is that it seems sometimes to contain some type of purpose. For example, when one hears Bach or sees a painting by Vincent van Gogh, we can feel some sort of significance in them, although we don’t know why. The painting, for instance, can only be a field of

flowers. What we do feel is that the painting or music is satisfying all by itself. It is only by slowing down that we can see the significance of the world is what is going on right now — not in some unknown future. Art such as cinema can do the same thing, too — we can see a film that, through the clarity of what we see on the screen, can open our eyes to what perhaps we had previously overlooked or failed to see. What had seemed ordinary now become extraordinary. Looking at a scenic Ozark vista, we can sense we are seeing something important,

and we connect to it. We can see life can be satisfying all by itself without an apparent deeper meaning.

Several years before my dad died, we were driving through North Carolina going to visit family there. Without a word of explanation, he pulled the car off the interstate and drove some distance down a smaller highway until we got to the historic golf resort at Pinehurst. Stopping the car at a portion of an exposed fairway, we got out of the car and walked to a split-rail fence that lined the outside of the course. We looked on

wordlessly for maybe five minutes at the tranquil pastoral landscape, until he finally murmured “beautiful” and walked back to the car. I like to think, at that moment, my dad finally connected with his purpose, with his greatness. And I can close my eyes whenever I have the need, feel the rough wood of that split fence with my hands, smell that heavy, grass scent and hear the distant crack of a faraway driver saying hallelujah.