The Living Have No Ghosts
The Living Have No Ghosts
As a litigator at Smith & Hudson, my salary flattered and exhilarated me, yet nothing I would purchase could soothe my private ghost. What about your dreams? she haunted. Despite skiing vacations in Aspen, Navajo silver and turquoise jewelry, health spas, and clothing boutique binges, the rattle of her questions would not subside. What about the you you wanted to become?
Oh, yeah, that. Too busy this week and next. Pink message mountains and manila file jungles on my desk; yellow Post-its crammed with case citations. Demands. Hours and minutes of my breath. Day after day, I'd scrutinize complaints and briefs until my eyes itched, blurred, then tilted toward the misted blue and white mountains outside my thirtieth floor window. This is my time on earth, I thought. Yet I have to down enough jolts of mocha java just to stay awake.
There was something I came for—wasn't there? The wondering gnawed at me, tainted with a peculiar sense of shame, the shame of not becoming. One chance to live. Something meaningful, deep in the canyons of my being, I could be doing. "Doing?" the critical voice in my head jumped in. You should be doing the brief in front of you. Stop asking fluffy, cosmic questions. Grow up. Accept life. You work. You buy a Honda. Later a Benz. You die. Who are you, someone special?
No, the ghost moaned. What about your dreams? What about the knowing inside you? This life of living on your surface will not complete you.
Maybe I just expected too much out of careers. After all, I didn't sweat in some factory or grope through my days with a swollen abdomen in a country that didn't have enough clean water, much less caffeine-free Diet Pepsi. “Do you know how hard other people work to earn the money we make in a week?” Alan, another attorney, once commented. He leaned back into his buttery leather chair. “There are worse things we could be doing,” he grinned. Still I wondered if there weren't better.
“You're using your writing talents,” my mother once assured me, as did others, since I wrote legal arguments and memorandums. But I might as well have been writing prescriptions or directions to a party. Like Picasso painting the deck or garage. Some inner creative clock ticked, clicked, and bonged in my mind. The sands of the hourglass seemed to pile up an incriminating mountain against me. One life. One chance. Could I risk never writing my poems, articles, and books, not even attempting to approach the palette of the artful life I fantasized? No. I could not face death knowing that I hadn't dared to live my life. “I'm not ready,” I would sob. Maybe throw my appointment book across the room or stomp my non-corporeal foot. “I didn't get my turn.”
I maintained this fantasy that, after death, voluminous beings in white robes would display a movie of my life: its meaning, lessons of love, opportunities, and special effects and scriptwriters. I dreaded the knowledge that I could have glided into my vision, clicked my heels three times, two times, even once, but I had chosen not to bother. “You were meant to write books,” sighed the angel in the fantasy, running the movie. She bowed her head, as her feathers shuddered with my cosmic shock and loss. “We thought you knew.”
One day in real life a connection smacked me between the eyes, in between sighs, in between calculating how many more hours and minutes of law I had to practice before I could retire and crawl off and curl up into sleep.
The angel in the after-death fantasy was the ghost that plagued my days. I did know. I did know. I did know. How could I ever feel peaceful again, not devoting my precious resources to the purpose and promise of my life? How could I ever see my time-robbing, monopolizing and lobotomizing job as “safe” just because it paid well? I felt at risk with every passing second. My heart beat the beat of a writer, while I struggled, shopped, and cried to therapists in the life of an overworked attorney. I did know.
And so do you. Only by living your dreams can you dispel your ghost. Your gnawing is your knowing. On the right path, there is no secret mortification and no phantoms. We pay our bills, climb our hills, and swoop through our lives with the lyricism of no regrets. No amount of money can buy this essential peace of mind. No salary ever pays enough for us to leave our truth behind.
Only a life of self-honor feels safe and sure.
Everything else leaves us empty, hungry, and haunted for more.
