Don't Miss It

A Special Kind of Urgency

Today is the day when retailers will be reminding you to not “miss it.” The deal. The offer. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Just the other day, I was reminded by a younger someone living in my house that when you spend $190 on eight pieces of clothing, that’s an incredible deal, one you really can’t pass up. She had a point.

Photo by Joshua Kettle on Unsplash

I remember that kind of math, the kind that says, “If you can, you should,” and, “If you should, then why haven’t you yet?” But as I get older, these types of scarcities hold less sway for me. I am not immune to loss aversion, that psychological concept that many a marketer has mastered, the one that tells you a person will pay, and pay dearly, to not have something taken away from them.

So when I tell you this thing I want to sell you is only twenty dollars and it used to be two hundred, even though I am asking you to part with your hard-earned money, it feels unwise to not participate in such an opportunity. Because really, you’d be getting one-hundred-eighty dollars in value. How could you pass that up?

To be sure, life is a game of avoiding loss, of doing our best to mitigate failures and minimize mistakes. And yet, it is also a game of unending loss. Because what is existence but one experience after another of losing things? Your hair, your youthful physique, your keys, and yes, even and especially your life. So the question is not will you miss it, but what will you miss? Because a lot is happening here, and you will certainly miss something. What will it be?

Today, I woke up to the beeping sounds of garbage trucks driving by my house. Oh yeah, I thought. Today is Friday, the day after our usual garbage day. But yesterday was a holiday, so today is now garbage day. And at this moment, the truck is in our cul-de-sac, beep-beep-beeping its way through a fifteen-point-turnaround so it can get out of our neighborhood crescent as quickly as possible. By the time I had run downstairs, it was too late. We had missed it.

When I looked around at the other houses, I saw that we all had missed it. No one had taken their trash to their curb last night, which made sense: we were all celebrating in our own ways. In the case of our home, we ate Indian for Thanksgiving, watched a bad Christmas movie (the first of hopefully many this season), and I fell asleep on the couch. We went to bed, forgetting to not only take out the trash but lock the front door. It was a good day.

This morning, I was cursing myself for being so lazy and unbuttoned. This is what happens, I thought, when you play things a little too fast and loose, when you eat biryani instead of turkey. You miss it. But as I stood in the kitchen, making coffee and grumbling to myself, I saw my neighbor—the diligent one with the deadly dog, bald head, and militant attitude—pulling his trash to the curb.

This is the guy with the immaculate garage and trim physique, the same guy who was in the Marines so many years past and never forgets to take out his trash. If it was good enough for him, I reasoned, it was good enough for me. So I pushed my feet into some old sneakers, lumbered out to meet the wintry air, and pulled my bins to the curb.

Not two minutes later, as both my pour-over and wife’s latte were coming done at the same time, I heard the familiar beeping of the garbage truck come again to our four-house cul-de-sac to carry away all our excess. Weird, I thought. Maybe the other truck was the recycling? A few minutes later, that came, too.

I don’t know if my neighbor had this guy on speed dial, if the garbage man gave us a second chance, or if Saint Nicholas was just smiling down on us that day. All I know is I needed that trash to be taken away. I needed a second chance. Because today is Black Friday, and there are deals, deals, deals. So many chances to fill that can with all kinds of packaging from the can’t-miss offers.

I don’t think we’ll go out today. We have no plans of participating in the frenzied buy-a-thon you see online. But you never know. I am, after all, only human and certainly American. Sometimes, we go out in the frenzy, ironically, or so we tell ourselves. It’s fun, my wife and I say, scrambling around from one suburban place of commerce to the next. Until, it isn’t, and all the competing Karens get in the way of a good walk around the mall.

So we chuckle to ourselves and sometimes share a sneer but mostly enjoy not getting too sucked into the chaos. Then I see a record I’ve wanted for some time—on sale!—and some running shoes I’ve thought about buying for a while, and I’m back in the Matrix, doing that curious kind of mathematics teenage girls know so well, caught in between the two poles of feeling I have everything I need and an intense longing for more.

This feeling, the one that says I will never have enough, does not go away, at least not so far as I can tell. But it can be redirected. This morning, for example, my wife awoke saying, “Let’s go sit on the front porch.” It’s freezing outside, at least for here, so I hated that idea but loved that she said it. Because it could have been, “I want a new refrigerator and it’s only eight hundred dollars. The sale started three hours ago, we might have already missed it.”

These days, this woman and I are aware of much that we are missing. Most of the time, we are okay with it. With the loss. There’s just so much, too much, to keep up with. None of these are bad things, but they just might be superfluous things. One more recital (seriously, how many times do we need to hear a chorus of eight-year-olds singing another rendition of “Jingle Bells”?). One more work-related rush of emails, phone calls, and text messages, all in service of some year-end project, sprint, or quarterly goal. One more holiday party, get-together, or celebration with friends already mentally moving on to the next thing they have to do in this harried season. We miss these things, gladly, all of them, and do not miss them at all.

But there are some things we are afraid to miss, some we might never get to experience again. These are those happenings that, in our forties, feel like they may be dwindling. It’s not that life feels over, it certainly doesn’t. Anyone who has traversed this passage of midlife can attest to the fact that there’s plenty of way to go (hopefully). But there is a certain preciousness these days to things that we have for so long taken for granted. We don’t want to miss those.

These include, but are not limited to:

• a walk around our neighborhood (must be done at least once, if not twice, per day, every day, without fail);

• using up the last of our gently-wilted vegetables in the fridge in a final stir-fry before going grocery shopping again;

• another sunset;

• a hike;

• the chance to make a fire outside;

• the chance to make a fire inside;

• sitting in our living room, listening to a record, all the way through, without interruption;

• reading one of the many books sitting on our respective nightstands;

• the opportunity to do something special with one of our kids;

• asking our parents something important we’ve always wanted to ask;

• being honest with ourselves and each other about what we really want;

• and so on.

There are so many things in life that one can miss, and it is hard to catch everything. But I am learning. Learning to take my time with the few things that matter, to disregard the world and its hurry, its nonsense of you can’t-miss-this and last-chance-for-that. It’s not that I don’t believe these claims (of course, I don’t). It’s that I don’t care anymore. I am trying, instead, to live with a special kind of urgency, the kind that the poets and hermits have embraced, the kind mystics are so intimate with, the kind of urgency that can feel entropy in action, the whole world crumbling, and speaks from the soul, saying, “It’s all right here, right now. Try not to miss it.”

Indeed, that is my hope. But for now, I’ll try the porch.

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P.S. My team and I have put together a special offer for you just today. It expires at midnight. Don’t miss it. All the details can be found here.