Green with envy

I’ve learned something. The grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence. It’s just more grass. Whatever situation you wish you were in, if you attained it, new problems would arise to take the place of the problems you’d hoped to escape.

For kids, that’s the wish for fame. When I taught Media Literacy in high school, we did a unit on celebrity—what it means to be famous, how the fame-and-fan dynamic drives the flow of money in society. By the end of our unit, I could always count on a number of students pronouncing their intention to avoid fame like they avoided the five-page essay. They wouldn’t touch either of them. Too many ridiculous complications.

In an era when other students were declaring “to get rich” as a career goal, defined by a specific list of products they would acquire, I took those pronouncements of fame-avoidance as a small victory.

The grass isn’t greener over there in Fame & Money Town. It’s just more grass. Maybe you can afford a gardener, maybe you park your Lamborghini in the circular drive next to your mansion, but the grass remains the same.

Even as adults, we let ourselves wander into a headspace where we’d choose any life but our own. I thought of that this morning, sitting on my front porch, wildly content, listening to the birds and drinking my first cup of coffee.

I remembered my dad, how he used to read the Burwell Tribune in the evenings and call out to my mom, “Here’s one! It has a creek running through it.” He was looking at real estate ads. My mom and dad were wondering if they should have chosen a ranch back in the Sandhills where my dad’s family lived, instead of the farm where my mom’s people had settled.

I think most of us do some version of that. We lament whether we should have chosen the larger city. The smaller one. The “better” job. The other way of life. The greener grass on the other side of that fence.

But it’s seldom true. It’s simply a coping mechanism to get us through another day of fighting off our familiar problems.

I won’t say the longing for change never produces positive outcomes. Sometimes, after counting the cost, we make a change with our eyes wide open and find that we’ve bettered our situation and embarked on some grand adventure because of it. That’s different.

I’m talking about the aimless grumbling that makes us look around and decide that every other person we could name, famous or not, is better off than we are. It’s the general mindset that lives at the corner of Fatigue and Self-Pity.

I’ve visited there. But thanks to the influence of the good and generous people in my life, I could never move in and make it my permanent address.

My mom and dad talked about the what-ifs. But they fully invested themselves in the here and now and made their lives, and the lives around them, better. My positive-minded colleagues in education did the same. Sure, there was always a new schedule or some new state mandate to overcome, but we didn’t wish away the good we could do on any particular day in favor of our longing for that Lamborghini. (Though we did long for fresh coffee and the time to drink it.)    

No one has it made. Seasons of ease or difficulty come to all of us, in their turn. But personalities, competitiveness, misunderstandings and plain old envy have a way of clouding our perception.

Those within our circle of acquaintances who are famous, for whatever reason, don’t have it any easier than the rest of us. Instead of pining, it’s wiser to invest our human resources in the here and now. To focus on making our own lives, and the lives around us, better.

I can tell you this. It beats the heck out of mowing more grass.