By Joe Broadmeadow
My grandson Wyatt spent the better part of an hour on a project that would have baffled any efficiency expert. He gathered every toy he could carry, one armload at a time, and fed them through a toy basketball hoop. Then he collected the same toys, stacked them into a pile, and started over. Through the hoop. Into the pile. Through the hoop again. He did this with the focus of a man who had somewhere to be, except there was nowhere to be, and no finish line he was working toward.
I watched the whole thing, and somewhere in the third or fourth cycle it occurred to me that I was looking at a philosophy lesson taught by someone who cannot yet tie his own shoes.
We spend most of our adult lives putting things through the hoop. We line up the accomplishments, the deadlines, the milestones, and we run them through one by one, telling ourselves the reward is on the other side. Then we stack the results into a pile, stand back, and wait to feel whatever it was we thought the pile would deliver. Often, the feeling never quite arrives.
We mistook the pile for the meaning.
Wyatt made no such mistake. He never once looked at his stack of toys as if it were an achievement. He knocked it down without a trace of grief because the stack was never the point. The doing was the point. The delight lived in the loop itself, in the reaching and the sorting and the small satisfying thump of one more toy dropping through, and it renewed itself every time he started again.
There is an old story about a man condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down each time he reaches the top. It is meant to be a picture of futility. But a philosopher once argued we should imagine that man happy, because the struggle itself is enough to fill a heart. Wyatt has never heard of the story, and he has already solved it. He is happy in the loop. He does not need the boulder to stay put.
I have spent a career measuring outcomes. In police work you close cases, you clear reports, you build the pile and you show it to people who ask what you accomplished. In writing you finish the manuscript, you tally the sales, you build a different pile. None of that is wrong. Piles have their uses. But watching Wyatt reminded me that the pile is a poor place to store your happiness, because piles are temporary by nature, and something in us always ends up knocking them down.
The trick, if there is one, is to find the part of the work you would do even if no one counted it, even if the stack got scattered the moment you finished. That is where the meaning was hiding the whole time. Wyatt found it in his backyard in an afternoon. It has taken me considerably longer, and I am not sure I have it yet.
He will grow up, of course, and the world will teach him to care about the pile. It teaches everyone eventually. But for one afternoon he had it exactly right, and I got to watch. That is not a small thing to carry home from another day in life.
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