I was seventeen when I discovered the shooting stars.   I was so enthralled that my best friends from high school, Jonathan and Louigi, fellow band geeks, came up to the farm.  We spent an August night in our sleeping bags on the hillside behind the barn, watching the Perseids, trying to think of ways to let our eyes close and still witness the meteor shower.  There was no funny business; just three chums, enjoying the dazzling spectacles that can unfold amidst summer aimlessness. 

I can’t help but think of that as the final night of my childhood.  A few days later, each of us started college.  Jonathan went on to become an engineer; Louigi a jazz musician; and I embarked on nearly a decade of higher education where I was initiated into the fine art of confusing accomplishments with fulfillment.  

Summers had purpose after that — a series of distasteful jobs where I practiced applying mascara, acting professional and pretending to like my work. I always managed to squeeze in a week or two of vacation before starting back at school, and I’d see those Perseids and remember that glorious night on the hill, when all energy was potential, and nothing was kinetic.  Then, while still marveling at those shooting stars, I’d work at convincing myself that the joy I’d experience from my accomplishments would soon supplant my pining for quiet time beneath a vast sky.  But always I returned to college life in August with deep sadness in my heart.  The Perseids were hidden behind the mercury vapor lights of university campuses, secreted away behind the forces of a daylight economy.  Those shooting stars came to represent the close of freedom, my return to the captivity of higher achievement.

I’ve given lots of reasons over the past 13 years for my choice to pursue an independent life, and  Bob’s and my ultimate decision to homeschool our daughters.  But deep down, I think the shooting stars had a lot to do with it.  I couldn’t bear to gaze up at them and think that they were a fireworks finale to be witnessed before returning to the demands of school and careers.  

So we said “no” to all of it.  No jobs.  No school.  And we immersed ourselves into a life tied to the seasons, where the Perseids were just one of many miraculous gifts from nature.

I changed my life to make room for the Perseids, but I still hadn’t sorted out the difference between acomplishment and fulfillment.  As Earth made its annual revolution through the Swift-Tuttle comet, I over-compensated for my lack of a professional title by seeking more and more accomplishments — Rigorous homeschool schedules, canning bushels upon bushels of myriad varieties of pickles (even though my family can’t finish a single jar in the course of a year); tending a garden with square-footage greater than my house, fighting the weeds growing up around my home as fiercely as I defended my Ph.D. dissertation, outlining book publication and promotion schedules.  It was true that I got to see the Perseids without worrying about packing off to college or some other 9-5 existence.  But it was also true that I was witnessing them because I was pushing myself to work late into the night, a slave to my compulsion to over-achieve and over-compensate for my lack of a title.  

Maybe hormones are causing the shift.  Or maybe it’s those stretching girls with their increasing ability to make me laugh at myself.  Maybe it’s the realization that the crinkles around my husband’s deep brown eyes have become more delicious over the twenty plus years we’ve been together.  Maybe it was escorting Mom and Dad through five surgeries in two years’ time.   Or maybe it is just the simple passage of years.  But somehow, I’m starting to learn the difference between fulfillment and accomplishment.  

Accomplishment might be a farm profit and loss statement in the black on December 31.  But fulfillment is sitting with my parents and Bob around a lunch table and working at keeping our business alive, tackling the challenges and setbacks, knowing that we are each others’ best friends, knowing that we all really want to see each other happy, knowing that we are playing this game together.  

Accomplishment is a child’s succesful test scores after doctors warned she might never read or perform school work.   Fulfillment is every day we sit down and move forward and backward with incremental steps, loving and forgiving each other through every times table, every written word.  It is learning to fight the pain with forgiveness, to keep our hearts light against the odds, and then defying them.  

Accomplishment is the publication of twenty essays per year and six books.  Fulfillment is the hours spent researching, then walking through the woods to ponder each word and thought.  It is rising before the sun, unsure how words and thoughts will mingle on the page during those pre-dawn hours, but taking the journey from the recesses of my mind and through my fingertips to discover what unfolds.

Accomplishment is the willowy barista who smiles brightly at her customers as she passes them their morning elixir.  Fulfillment is quietly stepping outside the house with my daughter at 3:45 am on cafe days…Then opening it up together, dialing in espresso shots and passing them back and forth, criticizing flavor and mouth feel until they’re perfect.  It’s encouraging her to taste, taste again, and keep tasting.  

Accomplishment is 17 years of marriage and 22 years of monogamy.  Fulfillment is morning coffee beside a pond, sharing ideas, puzzling out solutions to our problems, choosing our next adventures, feeling his hands enclose my own, and the touch of his lips on mine.  

Accomplishment is a bustling cafe.  Fulfillment is putting a homemade meal before a neighbor and seeing them take nourishment and pleasures from my labors, and standing back in the kitchen, bearing witness as community members greet and care for each other.

Accomplishment is just enough income to cover the property taxes.  Fulfillment is reclining on the stones outside at 3am in August, where the weeds around the house are obscured by darkness, watching the shooting stars, no longer sad at the passage of childhood, but thrilled for the joy of shooting stars.  It is learning that accomplishment is merely a mark in the book made as a  result of pursuing fulfillment above all else.