Life is filled with pursuits and ideals. It’s saturated with, “What do you do?” and “Where do you want to be in five years?” The notion of life’s “calling” is a monumental wrestling for many, perhaps all. Careers can be wonderful, and life goals and objectives are helpful and even necessary. I do want to argue, however, that life is about so much more. To me, life is about the people.
I am living this semester in Los Angeles, one of the most beautiful and wondrous cities in America. The daily weather forecast is sunny and perfect, and the close proximity of celebrities and the beach seems to be a life of vacation, but somehow I still find myself, every now and again, wishing I was at home with my family dreaming of how great my life would be in LA. I do absolutely love it here, but it’s different. It’s different because I’m not with the people that love me most.
I believe that all of life, no matter where we live or how great of a job we have, is about the people. It’s about finding those who truly love us and truly loving those around us. I miss my family, and I miss my friends and my girlfriend (I can’t believe I have a girlfriend), and the irony is that after this semester I’ll be back home with my family and I will absolutely be missing the wonderful friends and mentors I have made here. I find it so peculiar that we focus our lives on goals. We focus on careers and money and materials, but we look back and we don’t think of any of those things. We look back and reminisce about the late night conversations when we laughed until our stomachs ached and tears of joy were filling our eyes. We think about times we had no idea what to do, and the people we love cried with us and listened just because they cared. My family doesn’t sit around the dinner table at Christmas and talk about our jobs… We sit and remember all the memories we’ve made, and we get excited for the ones we don’t even know about yet.
Life is so beautiful. No matter where we go or what we are doing, it’s going to be the people that we remember, that we talk about. What we need is not more money or bigger houses. Better jobs and longer hours have never satisfied. We long for, we were created for, relationship. Our deepest desires stem from needing to feel loved and supported, and some of our greatest feats of strength and bravery come in giving love to those who don’t deserve it and don’t ask for it. We were created to live in community, together and in all our brokenness.
This topic has really weighed on my heart this semester. I have been missing my family and friends, but I have also been making new friends and learning a lot about film and television (obviously, it’s film school…). One of my projects is to give a presentation about a movie or show that has affected my life and faith. Naturally, I am giving it on The Office.
I realized that I don’t love the show because it’s funny or clever, necessarily. I love it because of how I feel related to the characters, and because of the people I have watched it with. Watching the show brings back so many great memories of bonding and laughing with people I love. Therefore, I believe it to be extremely fitting to end this article with an Office quote. It’s of Andy Bernard from the final episode, and it will always be engraved in my mind as one of the wisest sayings ever emitted. “I spent so much of my time here at Dunder Mifflin thinking about my old pals, my college a cappella group. Weird thing is now I’m exactly where I want to be. I’ve got my dream job at Cornell and I’m still just thinking about my old pals. Only now they’re the ones I made here. I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good ole days before you’ve actually left them.”
Life is not about what we do with our careers or how big our houses can get. It’s about who we go through those careers with and who we bring into those houses. Life is about the people, and it is beautiful.
