March 3, 2005 – Confronting a sense of duty

March 3, 2005 – Confronting a sense of duty

As I approach sixty years on the face of the earth, I’ve come to recognize the folly that has accompanied me through time. When I turned twenty years old, I had thoughts of having forty years before I reached the point I am now in life. And as anyone with plenty of time, I spent those early years of my life as if I had all the time in the world. I continually wished days, months, years away, in fact, I wished the whole three and a half years of military service away. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy many of those days in those years, but when life was not going right for me, I wished the whole three and a half years would pass so that I could get away from what was my perceived servitude.

Servitude is a great way to characterize stretches of your life. When you are young you are forced to serve the will of elders around you—going to school at their behest, doing chores, getting along with people you do not like, all the obligations put upon young people. In my case, I left that servitude for the duties of the military—the U.S. Navy to be specific. While I was indentured—I signed a contract that allowed the military to order me about at their discretion—I was told what training classes to take, what my grade point average had to be, and where I would put that training to use once I had completed my studies. Sounds a lot like high school, right? but I did have the option of failing and going into an even more servile world of a deck hand aboard ship.

I applied myself and did what was expected of me. I did not fail but not from fear of ending up a deck hand. The sense of duty was not so much to the Navy as it was to my sense of self and my need not to fail. In looking back in my Navy records, I scored slightly above average in all the classes I took. When examinations were offered to advance in rank, I took them and passed, advancing through the ranks at the right pace for someone wanting to make the military their career. Once my contract had been fulfilled, however, I left the military, fully expecting that my sense of duty would have been sated. But, that was not the case. As I married, I realized that my sense of duty now became the family I had just committed to be part of. The contract I had signed had no term limit. It would remain in force for as long as I chose to observe the terms.

Just as before, I could opt to fail, to end the commitment by simple saying so, but I did not, perhaps could not, just as the sense of self made me want to succeed in my military obligation so to it encouraged me to make this new commitment thrive as well. Once the family grew from two people to four with the arrival of my two daughters, that sense of duty now extended to an extended group of young souls who had no choice in whether to join my wife “I” and me—talk about responsibility. I shudder to think of the number of days I wished away during this time. The days waiting for each of them to be born, the days one of them was ill and there was nothing we could do but wait for the fever to break, the medication to fend off the infection, the heartbreak each child felt at something as silly as not winning the “Meet Duran-Duran” contest a local radio station sponsored, and don’t get me started on puberty, not having a date for the junior and senior prom at the all-girls school both daughters attended, the heartbreak of not getting the lead in the senior play Guys and Dolls.

Now that all those days are gone, I’m reconciled to having lost them to my folly. In my youth, I had a misguided sense that at some point I could be free of obligation. With the birth of two daughters, I came to realize that life itself is an obligation, the duty to feed and clothe, minister to appetites, protect from harm. Now that I’ve spent those forty years I had that many years ago, I’m becoming far more stingy with my time. Now, I’m wringing every measure from every minute I walk the earth. Now, the minutes of life have more meaning.