Three Items that Define our Lives

There are three items that almost everybody picks up through their lives - a small collection of high school yearbooks, a wedding ring, and a retirement gift. In the end that small collection of items, none of which necessarily has any intrinsic value, will tell the story of that person's life.

Not everybody graduates from high school and collects a diploma. But by law everybody does at least start high school, and so we all end up with at least one yearbook. That yearbook has our picture in it, in which we are always preserved as an awkward teenager. And because of tradition, we also spent the last day of school each year getting our friends, boyfriends or girlfriends, and other classmates to write something on the pages.

The picture is usually more an embarrassment than anything else. None of us are at our best during high school. But the scribbles of our friends and acquaintances mean something. They are the mirror that show us, years later, what other people thought of us. They carry in them the flame of strong feelings that we let go of later in life. They describe us as we were when we were young.

Although not everybody collects a wedding ring, most of us do and almost all of us aspire to. And while an engagement ring is often intended to be expensive and flashy, the wedding band itself generally aspires to simplicity. It may carry an inscription. It may be well crafted with a subtle, but beautiful design. Regardless of its appearance or value, however, its symbolic importance in our lives is tremendous, since marriage is the single greatest commitment one person makes to another.

Each marriage is different, and so the meaning of each wedding ring is different. It may symbolize a successful marriage, full of warmth, love, and support. It may represent a disastrous marriage that ended in deceit and divorce. It may represent a marriage with children, and all the work and love and patience that went into bringing them up right. It may represent the foundation that allowed a person to achieve success - or the obstacle that prevented it. Whatever that marriage is like, it is a cipher that allows us to understand the person who wears the ring because we are best described by the way we enter and regard our greatest commitment.

These days, with people staying at jobs for less and less time, a retirement gift may not be as common, but for anybody who commits to a career and an employer for a good portion of their lives, custom demands some kind of thanks for their service. That gift - or even its absence - represents the way we spent the days of our lives. It represents the work we did, how we did it, and our attitude toward work itself.

How we view our work describes us profoundly, since everybody's character will be tested during their lives. When we were asked to do something we didn't believe in, did we do it to keep our job or did we stand up to the pressure? When the work was hard, did we do it anyway, or did we try to take the easy way?

In the end, it's just three items, a pile of yearbooks, a wedding ring, and a retirement gift. But those three items say more about us than we would probably like to admit.