[...] What Maggie’s career had amounted to. The work she’d done had meant something to the world, and her teaching had meant quite a lot to me personally. But I could already see, from the professional perch I had just recently assumed, looking out across the future of my own burgeoning career and thinking about what it would look like when I myself was retiring—I could see how even a career as productive as Maggie’s might look small, in the end, to the person who lived it. I was not depressed, or annoyed at Maggie, but instead was enjoying a kind of pride at how understandable it all seemed. Maggie’s feelings. Maggie’s situation. Everyone’s situation, in the end. How human it was. How inevitable, but also, if you handled it right, if you approached life with the right attitude, how manageable. The toil I’d experienced in my twenties, the struggle with my own fantasies of greatness, or whatever, the mental work I’d done to disabuse myself of vague romantic notions of what I would someday accomplish, all of that seemed, in light of this new completely reasonable mindset, to have paid off. I was an adult. I had a career. I understood what Maggie’s career amounted to, and I did not need to pretend that I would accomplish more. Or that my end point would be any better. My career would be what it would be. My life was not larger than anyone else’s. I felt present, prepared. I even knew enough to know that I could not hang on to this wonderfully enlightened perspective. This was just another attitude I was moving through, and my future self would cycle through all my other moods as regularly as ever.