Greener Grass

"I wanna run through the halls of my high school / I wanna scream at the top of my lungs / I just found out there's no such thing as the real world / Just a lie you've got to rise above."
-John Mayer, "No Such Thing"


I had a thought today as I was driving along the road with my little son in the car seat in the back seat, headed to meet a friend and her two little sons for a walk on the river. There is this overworn expression, "The grass is always greener on the other side," and I started wondering why that is.

When I was in college and single and desperately wanting to get married and watching chick flicks to get a taste of love, I thought that getting married would complete me, would fulfill this wild longing inside me to be fully known and fully loved, to have someone listen to my every thought, see my every aspect, and crawl into my own internal dark caves with me and be my friend there. I wanted that someone who would understand me and completely appreciate me when no one else did.

When I was living in New York and trying to build an acting career, I felt like I was looking in the shiny glass window of a candy store, doing a dance on the sidewalk, desperately trying to be impressive enough to be let in the door so that I, too, could taste the candy that was this big step of "making it" as an actor.

When I was in middle school, I remember thinking that high school would be like some kind of dream world where I got a spiffy boyfriend and became really cool and lived some glossy teen movie-esque version of reality.

Needless to say, any time I did arrive at whatever destination I thought it was that would give me the ultimate fulfillment, I was disappointed. This could sound like a slam on my marriage, or my experiences as an actor, or my time in high school. But really, it just means that I was looking for ultimate fulfillment in something that could not deliver it.

It occurred to me in the car today, musing on these experiences, that maybe the reason the grass is always greener on the other side is that there really is another side, and we all are made with this longing for it. Looking back over this blog, I seem to be drawn to the following verse, as I referenced it in this post and again in this one and in this one. But apparently, it is worth mentioning again.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 in the Bible says that God has "set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

Maybe the reason we are so drawn to things that are on the "other side", and why we tend to think that the next, unknown step is going to lead us to what we are ultimately looking for, is that this notion hints at the truth. What we are looking for at our core is unknown to us, and it is a next step out of this world and into a "real world" we have never seen.

When I was a kid, my mom liked the tv show "Quantum Leap", about a guy called Dr. Sam Beckett who steps into a machine called a Quantum Leap Accelerator and then keeps leaping from the body of one person to another. The voiceover at the beginning of every episode went like this:

"And so Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home."

Aren't we all like that? We keep leaping from experience to experience, all the while with this primal desire to be in a place where everything is made right, a true home. The next world beckons.


We are all walking around with eternity in our hearts.