The Gift of Gavin
Today, I attended a fun food, drink, and music infused community event with a couple of hundred people at the yacht club in our small, lakeside town. I moved a town away a couple of years ago but still see this community as home, as I lived there for almost 25 years, got married and divorced there, raised our son, developed personal and collegial friendships, began and ended another long-term cohabitation-ship, was surrounded by my family, and had a wonderful 15-year career in social services there.
I was milling about the crowd when I ran into Gavin. He was a man I used to career counsel almost 25 years ago. We worked together closely for many months back then, developing a plan of action to get his professional pursuits off the ground. Gavin was an awkward late bloomer with about a decade of years over me. While he had prior work experience, he had a grand new dream and came to me for assistance in bringing that to life. He was not a particularly self-assured man but we worked on that. We spent a lot of time together helping him to discover his strengths and gifts, to find his voice, and to articulate his skills, talents, and work ethic in a way that any employer would value and appreciate. When Gavin and I reconnected today, it was a heart-happy moment for us both. He went on to be professionally successful in the career he’d dreamt of but admitted he still has the resume I created for him all those years ago and that he uses it as a template for other opportunities that cross his path even today. This made us both giggle. We parted ways with a handshake and I wished him well.
I continued to weave in and out of the crowd, bumping into old acquaintances, swapping current day realities along with smiles and embraces. A couple of hours later, I gathered my things and set off to exit across the car park. Gavin, seeing I was leaving came to me and leaned in warmly with a snug hug. It wasn’t awkward or inappropriate. It was kind and emotional. And to be honest, I was not having an easy day and I could have used the hug just as much as he apparently needed to give it. As he held me close, he whispered in my ear, “Thank you for everything you did for me. You’ll never know how much you helped me.” I was both surprised and touched. I heard what he said but it took a few moments to really sink in. It reminded me of the kindness and compassion that George Eliot aspired when he wrote,
“What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other.”
I don’t tell this story because I seek a pat on the head. I was doing my job and it was a job I loved, a job with great meaning, a job where I could have a real impact on people’s lives. It was just such a gift to see Gavin today, as if our reconnecting was meant to be. I was feeling down, ironically struggling to find my own value in recent days. I just celebrated my 51st birthday and birthdays will do that to you as you get older. You reflect more. You size up your successes. You review your losses against your acquisitions. You do a 360-degree assessment of your life. You try to figure out your next chapter after closing out yet another. And the thoughts, feelings, and conclusions I was arriving at were pretty stark and painful. One failure after the next. One starting-over after the next. Very little to feel proud of. Very little to show for a lifetime of hard work and a relentless drive for perfection. As I said, it’s been a bit dark in my head as of late and I’m ruminating and feeling weary.
But today, I was blessed with the gift of Gavin, and it helped to stunt and shift the obsessively negative narrative in my head and to remember that there was some good in there. The older we get, the more history we accumulate and good things just fold into the past, never to be seen again. It took everything in me to shower, to dress, and to leave my home today. Usually positive-minded, confident, and optimistic, recent days have had me questioning just about every part of my being. What have I achieved? What have I acquired? Why aren’t I further ahead? Where did I go wrong? Who the fuck am I? What the hell do I even want for myself anymore? Is this it? Existential crisis much? This is not a new phenomenon of course and I’ll soldier through this temporary hell, as we all must. I’ll do away with the self-pity and try to find the lesson in my brief but necessary meltdown.
Out of the flames walked Gavin, and for a few moments of my day, I remembered that I played a meaningful part in someone’s happy ending. The gift of Gavin was not only in coming face-to-face with him and reminiscing on our history but also remembering what feels good, what truly feeds me, then brainstorming how I can do more of THAT. We can do good for others for their sake, but I can openly and honestly admit that in doing so, it fills my cup too. I believe wholeheartedly the words of Author Danielle LaPorte who wrote,
“Giving is the antidote to emptiness.”
I also believe that while Gavin was an immediately tangible reminder of a previous time and space where I was able to have an impact, such acute gifts of Gavins are rare. We won’t always have reality slap us directly across the face the way Gavin’s brief re-entry into my world did. Sometimes we need to ask for help. We need to reach out to someone who can support us with recalibrating our version of reality, reminding us of the good things rather than staying in our own heads where we can easily drown in the riptide of repugnance.
