What’s Missing?

I’m not particularly good at singing but I love it. When I was 15, my parents moved our family to a new home on the other end of the city where I grew up. That meant going to a new school and having to make new friends.

In the new school, I decided to join the choir. I did that my last two years of high school. During my senior year, we did a Broadway Review. The practices were long, sometimes stretching late into the evening.

About a week before our debut, we were doing basically a technical rehearsal where we walked through the entire show, stopping to address any issues that lingered.

At around 8:30 pm (after we’d all been at the school for close to 14 hours), the director stopped the rehearsal which had devolved mostly into chaos anyway.

“Listen up! C’mon!! You’ve run the marathon. The finish line is only a hundred yards away, and now you’re going to lay down on the track and twitch?!”

That experience was nearly 30 years ago, but has guided me through many of the more difficult decisions and experiences I’ve had in my life. A handful of those decisions and experiences have been of the existential variety.

For some, addressing that question of who am I is a one off. Others will spend their lives contemplating that question. Perhaps, however, we spend even more of our time feeling like something is off; something’s missing.

And so we search; even unknowingly.

We search for the significance in our lives in work, in recreation, in rest, in relationships, and in knowledge.

That missing thing — whatever it is — might not be something that everyone needs to find. For you, maybe it’s okay to live out life working a job you don’t particularly enjoy, engaging only peripherally with family and friends, and binge-watching Netflix every night before you fall asleep, only to do it all again the next day.

I understand. Sometimes, the initial pain of trying to figure out what’s missing is too great for some people. The pain of change is often worse than the pain of staying the same, but there’s still pain.

Cognitive dissonance — this idea that our thoughts and beliefs don’t line up with our actions — is typically at the heart of the pain. We see our future selves in a particular (often different) way, but the way we act today doesn’t line up with getting there. That’s why so many people fail to achieve their goals.

Even more broadly, however, cognitive dissonance is a sort of moral compass pointing us toward the missing piece. Of course, when we find a missing piece, it’s not long before that internal discord chimes in again, pointing us toward something else that’s missing.

And so the search goes on. In fact, it is a lifelong pursuit. (That is, unless your lifelong pursuit is to watch EVERYTHING Netflix has to offer.)

Even as we search, it’s useful to remember that today we are enough. If we spend too much time chasing the missing pieces of our lives — real or perceived — the less joy we find in the moments that are here. Presence is something I’ve struggled with my entire adult life. Far too often, I’m stuck in the space of what will be when I have enough money or when I have more control over how I spend my time.

Whether you embrace a belief in life after this one or not, the aim of mortality is the same for all of us: improve ourselves and try to lessen the pain of someone else by helping them on their journey. It doesn’t matter, so much, how many of those missing pieces we find; just that we keep searching and finding joy in the journey.

The chaos of that technical rehearsal all those many years ago was a microcosm of self-discovery. We were 60 or so teenagers, all thrust together into a new school, just trying to figure out who we were. New friendships were born during that time of life. I am still friends today with some of the people I met doing that Broadway review.

To our choir director — with whom I also still have association today — perhaps laying down on the track was the exact right thing for us to do at that time.

And, since I know you’re interested, the show turned out pretty well.

Thanks for reading!