As I write this, I’m reading a wonderful book. It’s called A Three Dog Life. The author’s name is Abigail Thomas. It’s a memoir. I don’t usually read memoirs. Other people’s lives don’t interest me all that much, I suppose. Does that sound selfish and terrible? I suppose it might. I’d like to say the reason is that I’m too busy living my own life. Raising a family. Worrying about the future. I’d like to say that, but I’d be lying. So why am I reading this little story of a woman whose husband went out to walk the dog one night, got hit by a car, broke his skull open and changed both of their lives forever?

Whatever the reason, I’m reading it. Though I am only on page 30, I know my $13 was well spent and this passage explains why:

“Twenty years ago, I asked a friend if he felt, as I did, a kind of chronic longing, a longing I wanted to identify. ‘Of course,’ he answered. We were having lunch by the pond at 59th Street, watching the ducks. The sun was out, the grass was thick and green, the ducks paddled around in the not very blue pond. I was between lives. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What is it we are longing for?’ He thought a minute and said, ‘There isn’t any it. There is just the longing for it.’ Years later and a little wiser, I know what the longing was for: Here is where I belong.”

We are terrible longers, we ad people. No matter where we are, we long to be somewhere else. Goodby. Wieden. Chiat. If only I weren’t stuck in this sorry ass agency in Davenport, we think; if only I could squeeze my eyes shut and a wormhole would pass over me at that very moment and when I opened them, I would be awash in the glorious radiance of Crispin; if only I could be anywhere but here in Davenport, in Tacoma, in Providence, in Oklahoma City, life would be good, life would be perfect. The creative grass is never so green as it is anywhere but where we happen to be.

I have a friend. Great art director. Sensitive. Strategic. Brilliant in every sense. His name, I can assure you, has graced these pages more times than my own pitiful ego can tolerate. But as talented as he is, no matter the number of lions or pencils that lie in a cardboard box in his garage, he has never, in all the time I have known him, been what you would call a settled soul. Far from it. This is a guy who has never been happy; he looks at his lions and his pencils and then looks out at the horizon and says to himself, there’s more out there, I just know it. Somewhere over that hill is an agency that’s more cool, more hip, more urbane, more sophisticated, more something. And so he has never rooted in, choosing instead to pull up stakes, pack the tents and move on, his life and his career a perpetual circus train.

I have another friend. There are three people in advertising who write as well as she. If Apple had included her with Einstein, Picasso and Amelia Earhart in its Think Different campaign, I would not have so much as batted an eyelash. She has meant that much to the craft. But unlike my other friend, this one chose a different path. Not that the creative gravity of advertising’s super shops didn’t touch her. It did. How could it not? She could have let it pull her away to what I am sure would have been a charmed climb to the top of the ladder where all manner of corporate goodies would have awaited her. But a long time ago she decided that there are other gravitational forces that shape a career. Friends. Family. A dog. A mountain. A rock at the beach that looks like a goat. A path in the woods. A cozy house. These things do not exist on the circus train.

It is good to aspire. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do great work. To walk up on a stage at an awards show. To have people applauding for you. To see your name in the back of a CA awards annual. To make more money. To sit in a nice office. There is nothing wrong with wanting to work with clients who get it, who somehow are on the frequency, who gave courage. It’s OK to want to push the work, to reach down deep into yourself and find the best that you’re made of. These are good things. These are the things that separate the talented and the passionate from those in Hackland.

But I know this: My father once drove a forklift in a factory that stunk of oil and grease and steel shavings. I am not on my feet all day. I work in a comfortable office with an Aeron chair and air conditioning and an oriental rug. A person empties my trash barrel at night. I don’t punch a clock or eat tuna sandwiches out of a lunch pail or go home at night with metal shavings in my hair. And this would be no less true if I worked in Scranton or Bangor or Kalamazoo.

So by all means, long for doing great work. Long for terrific clients. Long for the day you get to work with a Nadav Kander, a David Lubars or a Frank Budgen. Long for these things with all your heart and soul. That’s OK. But if one day the stars align and the seas part and all of those things should happen for you, do not be surprised if the longing is still there, still nibbling in your brain. Because there isn’t any it. CA