we've already won

On the other side of noon, yesterday. The phone rings. I hear it bleating, can't remember where I put it, run from my toppled-over-with-work desk, find it just in time. Hello? It's my son on the other end, his voice like the gloaming, full of notes. "Hey," he says, and it begins. News about work (still more client projects migrating his way). News about his new city (it's gorgeous there, a newly found neighborhood recalling streets of Europe). News about friends (old, new, he might get that job after all, she remembered his name). I could hear the traffic of the street beside him. Vendors and bus rumbles. I could hear his words most of all, "I have everything I want in life."

Lately, as part of my job, I've been talking to people who have had pressed upon them extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Nothing about what they are facing is their fault. Much about the way they are living epitomizes grace—despite it all. Harrowing lives heroically lived. I stumble, I keep up, I listen, I write it down. I hang up, dazed and determined.

My son is living on an ad-man's starting salary in one of the world's most expensive cities, and he has all he wants. Those with whom I speak face the steepest hurdles, and yet there is light in them, plenty.

We go out, every day, in search of the big stuff. And yet, as my brother-in-law likes to say, we've already won.