What I Signed Up For

What I Signed Up For

We ask ourselves some version of that question every day. It most often comes in the form of a negative. We all understand what we didn’t sign up for, but do we really know what we did sign up for?

If I don’t know by my age there must be something wrong with me, so I’m going to start with the assumption that I do know, but that I need some help in extracting the information.

Let’s go back in time and maybe I can dissect this. When I was a kid I just wanted a bologna sandwich, some Fritos and maybe a Twinkie or two. The Christmas dreams were equally modest, consisting of the play sets (farm, garage, rocket launch pad, etc.) up on the aisle-tops at the Piggly-Wiggly. As I recall they were $8.95 – $10.95, but very sweet from what I could see of them. I was also partial to all that under $1 stuff at the back of the comic books like x-Ray specs. Life was easy and the dreams were pretty modest. I went to Sunday School, but religion was not a big item in our household. The big thing I know I signed up for was education. My mother was in graduate school, so I knew I was signing up for higher education.

When I was in high school in Rome and mostly left to my own devices, I hankered for diet soda (hard to get in Europe in the 60’s), American TV and movies and whatever the next bigger motorcycle I coveted (Ducati, Gilera, Moto Guzzi, Laverda, Triumph 650, Kawasaki 500, Honda 750). Mostly I wanted a cute girlfriend. The big thing I know I signed up for was going back to the United States to be an American College Student despite Kent State.

College was a transition from childish vocational dreams to stark realities of what I was equipped to do well. I did not sign up for engineering because I was no baby-killer (peer pressure was a huge driver in those transition years) and I hit the wall on calculus. As best I could tell, it was hard to be a good engineer if calculus was beyond you. By the end of school I got into organizational management and it fit. I could speak well, analyze things, solve things, motivate people, organize people, advocate things, and generally make things happen. That was when I signed up for business school and stopped thinking I was going to be a chemist or something that sounded cool to a kid. Oh yeah, and I was still looking for the right cute girl for some reason.

When I went into banking I signed up for a five year stint to learn what I might like in business and learn where I might like to live. I got married early without a thought to how marriage might alter the plan I thought I was signing up for. I had found the cute girl and just figured I’d figure the rest out as I went. By the end of this early career stage I had fully signed up for suburban life, something my expat upbringing had caused me to miss. Settling down seemed an OK plan to someone who had moved every three years of his life.

Then the career bug kicked in. Big time. I was a beast. I was a workaholic, mostly to fill in for whatever settled down suburban life was not naturally providing me. Success is a drug, especially for a fatherless mutt like me. Being a high-flyer at work was easy to sign up for. It had lots of feel-good and then they started giving me extra money for it too. Imagine that. Before long I had bought the nicest house in our suburban town and was topping-out in suburbia. Time for more. And more again.

What I did not sign up for was a topped-out suburban life with a cute wife that had that anthropologically unusual characteristic of limited wants. With hindsight, I should have seen what a valuable characteristic that was, but at the moment it felt limiting and not in synch with my growing stature in an industry which was exploding upward. So I signed up for a life that put stability much lower on the totem pole than most people would want. I chose to fly high and accept all the risks and rewards that come with that.

Wings always melt and we all fall to earth sooner or later. I found another cute woman with more wants and thought that might help. I did sign up for all that that made possible and I found that when I fell I got up more easily unharmed than most. That’s quite a revelation. It’s not quite Jeff Bridges in Unbreakable, but it’s similar. I remember being told during my two-year exile to Siberia that it was a long way back, but guess what? I made it back, they put my picture back on the wall and gave me back my old uniform and rank. No one could have known or guessed to sign up for that, but it happened.

By that time I had grown to finally be a man (better late than never). What I decided to sign up for was a loving wife, dedication to my children, high enthusiasm and effort in my work and enjoyment of all my passions (motorcycles, skiing, travel) as much as possible. I can think of few things I would say I didn’t sign up for. That may be the sign of final arrival at your destiny. If whatever you do is what you signed up for, I suspect you made it.