My Hierarchy of Needs

And to be clear, I am not talking about only Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Most folks are familiar with the pyramid, food, water, shelter and safety sits as the foundation.  As those needs are met, the focus shifts up the pyramid until we get to the top, self-actualization.  At this moment in my life, that does not feel like it quite fits me.  It fact, it almost feels backwards.  After losing Bride, I find myself asking a different set of questions.  Not simply what I need to live, the real bigger question is who I want to be in the world now. 

I feel self-actualization wants to be the foundation my other needs rest upon.  I could probably wrestle mine thinking into Maslow’s framework, and I am simply not going to do that.  Aside from exploring what I need, I also need to determine who I want to be in the world without Bride by my side.   For most of my adult life, many parts of that answer were already intertwined with being a husband.  I wasn’t just Smitty.  I was Bride’s husband.  We built a life together, shared dreams, solved problems, made plans, and grew into who we became side by side.  When she died, I wasn’t only grieving her, I was grieving a future and a version of myself that would never arrive.

Somewhere in that grief another question appeared.

Who do I want to be without Bride. 

For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t sure I had an answer.   That’s an uncomfortable place to find yourself after decades of having a pretty good idea of who ya are.  Being a husband had been part of that answer for decades.  A lot of my other answers had been built around that one.  Not completely, and certainly not exclusively.  Yet it had become one of the foundation stones of who I understood myself to be. 

That feels bigger than self-actualization.  It feels like the foundation all of it should be resting upon. For me, this is a way bigger than a psychological exercise.   This is about cyphering out how to build a meaningful life in a future I never planned for.  I think that is why I have that pyramid upside down. 

When we are young, our needs often shape our identity.  We work hard to build security so we can become somebody.   We build careers, relationships, families, and communities.  We spend years stacking blocks on a foundation we hope will hold.  A job becomes a profession.  A profession becomes a career.  A relationship becomes a marriage.  Responsibilities become routines.  And before long, much of life is spent maintaining what we have built.

The question no longer seems to be what am I trying to build.  I have those T-shirts and this gig I have now will most likely be my last.  The question seems to be what all that building was for in the first place.  The first half of life is often about building.  Building careers, building families, and financial security.  Building reputations and a life.  For decades many of us are focused on adding the next brick to whatever we are constructing.  

Then one day something shifts.  Maybe it comes with age.  Maybe it comes with loss.  Maybe it comes when you realize there are fewer years ahead than behind.  Maybe it comes after you’ve achieved enough goals to realize the goals themselves aren’t the answer.  The question then becomes, what was all this building for?  Maybe that's the question nobody askes when we’re younger because we are too busy hauling bricks.  Was it to accumulate things?  Was it to collect accomplishments?  Was it checking the boxes?   Maybe.  The older I get, the more I think the hierarchy isn’t really about needs at all.  Maybe all those years were preparing me for something else entirely.   Not what I wanted to have, but maybe it's who I wanted to become. 

Am I healthy enough to enjoy the years I have left?  Am I spending enough time with the ones who matter most to me?  Am I contributing to something helpful.  Am I still learning?   Am I still curious?  Am I still able to create?  Am I investing in things that will outlast me?  Am I making room for joy?  Am I making room for love?  Am I becoming the kind of old man I’d like to hang out with?  

The funny thing is that I don’t feel like I’m starting over.  I hear folks talking about reinvention as if one morning ya wake up, thrown away everything that came before and voila, you become a brand new person.  I know that ain’t how that works.  At least not for me.  Every success, every mistake, every relationship, every heartbreak, every hard earned lesson has left its fingerprints on who I am.  I wouldn’t be me without all of it.

The older I get, the more I realize this season of life isn’t about becoming someone else.  It is about becoming a more intentional version of the person all those years were shaping me into in the first place.  Luckily I’m not building from scratch.  I've got a lot of material to work with.  I don’t need to tear the whole house down.  I need to decide what stays, what goes, what deserves a little more room than it used to have.  I’m standing inside a house built over many decades, looking around with a fresh set of eyes.  Some rooms still serve a purpose.  Some need repaired or repainted.  Some have become cluttered with things that once mattered, and matter less now.  And maybe there are a few rooms I have been meaning to build all along. 

The older I get, the less interested I am in accumulating and more interested in what I am aligning with.   Like aligning my time with my priorities.  Aligning my values with my actions.  Aligning my energy with the people and causes that matter the most to me.  I guess that is one of the gifts of aging, putting a stop to the asking what the world expects of me and asking more pointed questions about what matters to me.

I can stop chasing every opportunity and start choosing the ones that are truly worthy of my attention.  I am past the point of needing to prove myself, to anyone.  In these days I want to spend more time understanding this new self I am becoming better.  Maybe that is the real work on this part of the journey.  Not becoming someone new.  Not returning to who I once was.  Not living in the past or endlessly planning what’s next.  Maybe that’s where I've finally landed. 

What started as an attempt to rethink Maslow’s hierarchy of needs turned into a different question all together.  I spent a lot of time thinking about what I need, what matters, who I want to be, and what makes a life feel well lived.  In the end, I don’t think I am trying to build a better hierarchy.  I am pretty sure I am just trying to build a life worth growing into.   These days, success feels less like reaching the top of a pyramid and more like waking up grateful for what has been, curious about what could be, and intentional about who I am becoming.  If I can keep finding people to love, places to belong, things to learn, ways to serve and something worth building, then maybe everything else takes care of itself. 

At this stage of my life, I’m less interested in finding the perfect answer and more interested in creating a life worth growing into. 

I’ll keep ya posted.  

Turns Out Writing Is How I Listen

I was texting with a friend recently about my recent blog on loneliness.  They said I was able to put words to a feeling they sit with often.  They went through a divorce a couple of years ago that included relocating quite some distance away.  They also mentioned that I was inspiring them to write.  I encouraged them to do exactly that, even if they didn’t publish anything like I have done mine.  The conversation got me thinking about something I already knew but didn’t have all the words for.  I was reminded that I didn’t start this blog because I thought I had any answers.  Most days I’m trying to figure things out pretty much in real time.  In fact, I’ve discovered that many of the things I write about aren’t things I already know.  They’re things I find out while I am pecking on the keyboard. 

Looking back, I figured that out decades ago.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve done a lot of wandering around inside my own head.  I can spend days overthinking things, turning it over and over again, running down rabbit holes and revisiting conversations that ended a long time ago.  As a buddy of mine would say, “I think we have kicked that particular horse to liquefaction.”  I used to think writing was what happened after all that processing was done.  Think about, figure it out, and then peck away on a keyboard. 

I have known for a while that typing it out helps me, and since Sandy died, it has become clear that the writing is where the real processing is happening.  Thoughts floating around in my head tend to stay half formed, kinda like puzzle pieces scattered on the table.  Once they hit the keyboard, they slow down long enough for me to look at them.  The connections start to appear, things I thought I had a good grip on take on a different meaning.  Things I didn’t realize were bugging me suddenly pop up.   Some of the biggest things I’ve learned about grief, loneliness, friendship, gratitude, marriage, and myself weren’t conclusions I sat down with.  They were discoveries that showed up somewhere around paragraph 3.

It might not be apparent to Y’all, but many times these posts start in one place and end up in an entirely different place.  What begins as a story about an old photograph, a song on the radio, an empty chair, or a cup sitting on the counter often becomes some new discovery about myself.  The story gets me started, the writing helps me figure out where I was actually headed.  I see this progressing in my posts, especially since April, which hardly makes sense to me, and here we are anyway.  The object or the story was almost never the point.  It was just the thread I started yanking on. 

I think that is why I keep writing.  Not because I have some great wisdom to share, and certainly not because I have life all figured out.  That is definitely not the case.  If anything, the older I get the more comfortable I become admitting that I don’t.   What writing gives me is a chance to slow down long enough to pay attention to what’s happening in my body and brain.  Life in general moves along at a blistering pace.  Thoughts come and go, feelings show up, make a mess of things and then run off and hide in the corner.  Writing forces me to wander my ass over to that dark corner and sit with those feelings for a while.  And that forces the questions I wasn’t planning on being asked, and that I have even less of an idea how to answer.

One of the surprising parts has been discovering that the things I am learning along the way aren’t always mine alone.  Time after time someone reaches out and says, “I thought I was the only one who felt that way” or “I didn’t know how to put that into words until I read what you wrote.”  Or just the many little notes of appreciation for writing these posts and  sharing them with the world on my little blog.  Most times I find it a bit odd because I am usually trying to make sense of my own thoughts when I start typing.   Somehow, in the process of listening to myself, other people hear parts of their own story too.

Maybe that’s because the things we carry around aren’t nearly as unique as we like to think they are.  The whole human condition thing and all.  The details may vary, the names change, and the stories are different.  One person may be grieving the loss of a spouse, another is grieving a marriage that ended and a life journey diverted.  Someone else might have lost a parent, or a close friend.  For others it could be a dream that didn’t work out the way they had hoped.  The circumstances are different, and the feelings underneath most of the time are not.  Whatever it was that I uncovered while pecking away on the keyboard is usually something they see in themselves.   

Maybe that’s what kept rattling around in my head after we finished texting.  Not because they complimented my writing.  What stuck with me was the realization that they had seen a piece of themselves in something I wrote while trying to understand myself.  That’s kind of amazing when ya stop and ponder on it for a moment. 

Two people living very different lives, carrying different stories and different scars, somehow finding common ground in places neither of us would have chosen to visit.  It felt like one of those rare moments when two people realize they’ve been carrying the same thing, even if they arrived there on different roads.  Maybe I wasn’t trying to understand myself after all.  Maybe the thing I keep finding in these stories isn’t answers.  It’s connection.  Because when somebody says, “Yeah, I know that feeling,” you realize that neither of us are quite as alone as we might have thought we were. 

Here is the Oratory that started it all.