On a recent trip to Phoenix, I engaged in three conversations with people on a quest for happiness.  The first exchange was with a striking young couple sitting beside me on the trip out.  The man said he and his family are relocating, moving from Chicago to Phoenix. 

For the first hour of the flight he read a book on how to increase your profits.  When we began talking he was exuberant about a job in Phoenix to analyze the profits of Christian radio stations in the southwest.  He and his wife were going to find a place to live, where his wife will home school their four children.

“Why Phoenix?” I asked. 

“The sky is clear and blue,” he said.  Smiling, he added: “And the sky is the limit.”

Waiting in the Phoenix airport for my return flight to Chicago I sat directly across from two 35-year-old couples who apparently had traveled to Phoenix to explore relocating to the Phoenix area.  One couple was totally sold on the area.  They went on about the weather, the Palm trees, the swimming pools “in everyone’s backyard,” and the mountains to the north and south of the city.

The other couple was divided.  The man was in; the woman was not.  “I know you like it,” she said to her husband. 

“No, I love it,” he countered.

“Great.  But I’m a Chicago girl.  I have the kids to think about.  I have my parents to take care of.  I like our parish.  It’s not nearly as easy as you make it sound, buddy.”

The intensity of the conversation between these two couples belied the fact that it was barely 6 am.  Their talk was so intense it was all I could do keep from refereeing and even throwing in my two cents.  Finally, the unsettled woman crossed her arms, looked out the window at the mountains in the distance and said, “I just don’t know.  I’m just not ready to decide.”

The third reminder of the struggle to make sense of our hopes and dreams came during the flight back.  I sat next to a 43-old-woman and her 12-year-old son.  They were traveling back to Chicago to see the woman’s first grandchild.  For more than a year she has lived in Apache Junction, 20 miles east of Phoenix. 

“What took you to the Phoenix area?” I asked. 

“My parents retired there from Chicago, and I wanted to be with them more than once or twice a year,” she said.  “I wanted my son to know his grandparents.  So we moved.”

I asked about her work.  “Work is about the same anywhere,” she said.  “I am a server at a restaurant.  I serve early bird specials to the snow birds.  I make retired people happy.  Good tips all winter.  But swimming in my parents’ pool is better than the tips.”

I pushed my seat back and thought about the three conversations.  My conviction is that God knows the destiny of every human.  Indeed, we humans are endowed with certain abilities and desires, and most want to make a significant mark. 

Writer Os Guinness said it this way:  “Our gifts and destiny do not lie expressly in our parents’ wishes, our boss’s plans, our peer group’s pressures, our generation’s prospects, or our society’s demands.  Rather, we each need to know our own unique design, which is God’s design for us.”

I agree, but a piece in a recent online newsletter for working journalists from the Poynter Institute made me think of the struggle to find exactly where we each fit in life.  Writer Scott Libin tells of a journalist friend, a small-market TV news director, who was intimately involved in every detail of the news.  The guy running the newsroom was shooting the game for that night’s newscast.

Libin talked about how difficult it often is to get outside of doing everything, especially if it involves doing things we can do better than most people.  “By indulging ourselves that way, we virtually ensure that nobody else will get any better at those things than we are,” Libin said.

Libin argues for managers to concentrate on doing only what they can do.  As a manager that includes planning, preparing, reviewing and clarifying values. 

If those with busy lives, even those dreaming of Arizona skies, could find time to ponder, clarify and manage their unique contribution to life, it might not really matter so much whether they lived in Chicago or Phoenix.