What we're really afraid of

A few days after I turned 30, one of the guys at the shop asked what I thought of the whole thing.

Off the top of my head, I jokingly offered that 30 was the birthday to feel bad about what you haven't done yet - I would save wrestling with my own mortality for my 40th. Still, I keep coming back to that point more often than I used to, and that has to mean something, right?

Half the fun of stalking old high school classmates on Facebook comes from seeing how you measure up. Are they married? Do they have kids? Are they working at a better place than you do? Are they in Boise or New York City? It's all a very complicated formula that we all work out in our heads to see where we are and where we're headed.

As my graduating class got out of college or moved ahead with their lives, it used to be about who was ahead and who was behind. Now, it's more of a race against the clock - though not an all-encompassing one - to get as far ahead as you can. In short, it's gone from achieving to impress others to achieving to impress yourself.

Lately I've been incredibly motivated by the desire to not leave anything left undone, unsaid or unattempted. I can't imagine I'm alone in this strange drive.

While the end point is a bit different, the overriding question remains the same - what have I done so far?

This was on my mind when I read a feature piece in ESPN the Magazine about James Felton, a NBA prospect who drank his way out of college, out of professional basketball and eventually out of chances.

When you read the story, it breaks your heart. It's about a young man blessed with natural talent and the requisite size to make a run at professional basketball, but lost the heart to play and eventually drank himself to an early death.

At the forefront of Felton's collapse was a strange series of events, lasting only one play in a game at a basketball camp, where Tracy McGrady went from a complete unknown to the guy who dunked on James Felton. while that is the major plot point, it's by no means the underlying message of the piece.

I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing for Americans who are bred to back underdogs and those who make it big in the world with nothing but their wits and a few dollars to their name, but we tend to put a lot of stock in living up to one's potential.

When that fails to happen, it's viewed as nothing short of a tragedy and much is made of the what could have been's. We're just as entranced by stories of success of little guys who became moguls like Marhsall Field and Jay-Z as we are of flameouts like we saw with Mike Tyson and John DeLorean.

So maybe one moment at an ABCD camp didn't ruin his life; his demons did. If, as he said when he was younger, he got his manhood from the game, maybe it was stripped from him that day on the court, for everyone to see. Or maybe it was just the tipping point for a troubled soul, one who never felt comfortable being what everyone said he should be.

God had given him the gifts of height and skill, but Felton could never handle the expectations that came with them.

"His family and people in the neighborhood always asked James, 'When you gonna buy me a house?'" (his wife) Rana says. "I'd tell him, 'You don't have to do this. If you never play again, I'm okay with that.'"

But Felton's life was entangled in the game. It was all he knew.

I think that the source of our morbid curiosity with tales of failure steams from a need for them to be cautionary tales. Just like funerals can be jarring reminders of the need to make our days count, these stories serve a similar purpose. They remind us to do our best to stay on track and try to live up to our potential, regardless of where those talents lie or how our potential may manifest itself.

Mainly, they remind us that simply being able isn't really enough sometimes.

While it's easiest to see cut and dried stories like Felton's in sports, where quantifying success is made simpler by stats and trophies, it's by no means localized there. For every pitcher who trashes is shoulder in AAA, there are hundreds of frustrated artists who need to work to support a family and musicians who never caught the right series of breaks to reach an audience that needed them.

Again, simply being able isn't enough.

As tragic as stories like Felton's are, they aren't the worst case scenario. I'm convinced that distinction is reserved for everyone else that we never even hear about who can't ever get off the ground high enough to crash and burn.