“None of this matters, you know. Nothing matters,” quipped my dad. He followed the statement with a mischievous grin. Look away too quickly and you’ll miss the meaning in that grin. On the surface, it’s fun. Quirky. Look closer and you’ll see the sadness in the eyes. The defeat in the tone.
I had just spent twenty minutes slouched over his laptop, eagerly teaching him how to upload his homework into an online portal for his project management class. It was a drag-and-drop uploader. We started with the basics: differences between download and upload, where downloads automatically go on a hard-drive, resizing windows to see multiple programs at once. I blew his mind with that last one. “Think of them like stacks of paper on your desk. You’re just moving papers around - putting them on top of each other, moving one to the side,” I coached. I was eager and deeply invested.
The assignment we had to upload was the results from his StrengthsFinder assessment. This is a personality assessment developed by Don Clifton, the former chairman of Gallup. The guy wrote a book, basically bucketing human personality into four categories: Executors, Influencers, Relationship Builders, and Strategic Thinkers1. Now the book serves as a guide for mid-level managers to assert their Business and Leadership expertise onto their underlings, which is about the most depressing sentence I’ve ever typed. To my great pleasure, I got a sneak peek at my dad’s results. He’s a relationship builder. His strengths are building harmony and relating to people. (Adorable? Yes.) “I scored lowest in strategic thinking,” he mused.
My dad is a 62-year-old man who was hit in the head by a tree two years ago and nearly died. An arborist and laborer his entire career. Not computer savvy, per se. Many years ago at a team dinner out of town, some jackass said, “Wait. So your dad is a… landscaper?!” The table erupted in laughter. A table of strivers. Those with well-manicured hands that earn their living by uploading documents. We were playing an ice-breaker that my mid-level managers had forced their underlings to play to feel like they’re excelling at Business and Leadership. “You all can fuck off,” I said. Everyone went quiet. Then I seethed and plotted the jackasses firing. And whether or not it was my doing, he was eventually let go. Spoiler alert: I scored highest in strategic thinking. I’m ‘futuristic and energize others with my visions of the future’. Also conniving and vindictive AF. (I got you, dad.)
My dad just entered his second term of community college. Not by choice, to be clear. He’s not allowed to climb trees anymore, so his employer is having him re-trained. For what, we’ll never know. I’m not allowed in those meetings despite my attempts. His course load this term is Plant Identification II, and Project Management I. He was in an intro to computers course, but dropped it in the second week. Go figure.
“So. Think you’ll remember how to do this without me?” I asked, finishing our lesson. I was desperate for him to excel. Like I said, deeply invested. I tend to get overly excited about little assignments. A striver, some would say. Sometimes I forget about what it is I’m actually striving for. Head pats and chin chucks, mainly. Nods of approval, obviously. I assumed my dad felt the same way.
But then he said nothing matters and it stopped me in my tracks. Sometimes I get so caught up in little assignments that I forget I’m just an organism on Planet Earth floating in space. In short, none of this matters.
Let’s look at the facts: Here is a human organism who almost died two years ago. Today, he’s making flashcards to memorize the latin names of plants. He has just learned that humans send electronic documents to other humans that summarize and rank his personality into four categories. Categories that some self-important guy invented twenty years ago and then figured out how to convince millions of other human organisms to buy into. The self-important guy got richer, no doubt. An Influencer, I’d guess. My dad’s intelligence will be rated based on his ability to understand and connect to these categories. All because he was hit in the head by a tree.
We looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then we laughed hysterically together. These are depressing thoughts. But we come from a long line of depressives, my dad and I. There’s some comfort in this meaninglessness, honestly. It reminds me to not get so caught up in little assignments.
The next day, my dad sent me a text message. This is what it said:
That same day, I read the following passage in War & Peace2: “One flash, and I’ll never see that sunshine, that water, that mountain gorge ever again . . .” In this scene, Nikolai Rostov (a young and eager cadet in the Russian Hussar regiment during the Napoleonic War) is noticing the beautiful landscape that he’s surrounded by. It comes at the same time he has a near-miss with death after being shot at for the first time. Here, in 1805, a young striver provides me with the answer to what matters. Not nothing. Also not everything. But some things, definitely. Some things matter.
If you love reading about and taking personality tests, the StrengthsFinder info can be found here.
The War & Peace Slow Reading Group is a literal party, you guys. I read my little chapters every day and then go see what’s going on in the daily chat. It’s a little assignment that I’m very much caught up in, but it feels like it matters. Highly recommend.
This is very sweet, "ode to dad" - and I'm furious at the jackass at the team dinner, hopefully getting canned taught him some humility and grace.