Contracts

“What did you think you were going to be like when you grew up?” asked my friend Kate today, after she told me about how she knew she was going to be lucky, even when she was a little kid.

Kate is lucky — she always gets great parking spaces and finds just the kind of shoes her son has been asking for, free on the side of the road. Even if those shoes are the wrong size, she’ll call to tell me about it: Exhibit Q-87 that her life is utterly charmed.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Excuse me, I think you just said you thought you were going to be Jesus when you grew up.”

I don’t think I ever told anybody that until today, but now I guess I’ll tell everybody: when I was little, I thought I was going to usher you into perpetual bliss on Judgement Day.

Now, when you’re little, Jesus seems a lot like Superman, but there are undeniable differences between the two: Superman has fun and flies around touching fingers with Lois Lane, while Jesus doesn’t have a girlfriend and he sometimes walks on water, but he mostly just does stuff like that to prove a point to somebody who is being disappointing. Superman gets into scrapes partly for the fun of getting out of them, while Jesus gets tortured and jeered at and then dies in really the most horrifying scrape. We all respect Jesus — we really do — but nobody envies him.

I should tell you my family never went to church, so I knew next to nothing about the Lamb of God, other than what the expression on his face in paintings led me to believe: here was a guy with lots of responsibilities, who bore them with equanimity, wore a comfortable-enough-looking caftan, and who got a pantsload of respect and attention for doing his job. At seven years old, or whenever it was I decided I would become the second coming of Christ, this seemed like as good a deal as any.

But then, I was a kid with a lot of jobs: finding my mom’s glasses and keys, making sure my little sister didn’t wander off at the music festival, assuring the aftercare teacher at school that somebody would show up to get us soon, even though it was 6:30 and pitch dark outside and she no doubt wanted to be at home drinking boxed wine and watching the news. At the time, my parents (cherubs that they are) had no idea I was mentally preparing myself for martyrdom on the grandest scale. All they knew is I was just really great at keeping track of dentist appointments.

It turned out, though — and you’re not going to believe this — that it has not become necessary for me to sacrifice even a fingernail clipping in exchange for the everlasting souls of Earth’s people. And I don’t even want to, to be honest.

So, today I’m thinking about the invisible contracts we enter into — we’ve all got invisible filing cabinets full of them. The day we’re born, we’re issued a little invisible pen, and we start signing away on offers, counteroffers, amendments to this and that agreement. And you sign what you’ve got to sign based on what’s served up in your life in these moments. My situation was different from Kate’s, so she got to sign the contract in which she grew up to be lucky, while the best deal I could broker back when I was in second grade was the Jesus one, which I think we can all agree is a complete dud.

But here’s what nobody tells you: you can renegotiate at any time. It’s incredible, but all you’ve got to do is flip through your filing cabinet and find the one that says,

“I, YOUR NAME HERE, must spend every Thanksgiving Day with my racist, sexist extended family and let Uncle Richard and Aunt Patty make my children feel as small and unwelcome as they made me feel when I was their age.”

And you just tear that dumb contract up and write a fresh one. The other signatories might fuss a bit, but you’ll come to a new agreement in time.

Here’s the thing: you have power. Maybe not Superman power, hopefully not Jesus power, but it’s the power to write and observe only the contracts that are commensurate with your values and desires. It might take a lifetime to get there, but what else you gonna do?

Here’s what I’m trying these days: I imagine the contract I have around a certain person or situation and think, “Does this contract suck? What contract do I wish I had instead?” And then I imagine the one I want instead —this might take me a couple minutes or a month — and then sign it with the little invisible pen I got when I was a baby. Of course, this exercise feels silly at first, but listen: I know you’ve got some ludicrous shit cooling its heels in your invisible contract cabinet.

Maybe not as ludicrous as the Jesus one, but pretty bad.