You got what you wanted. Now what?

The thing you were pointed at for years arrives. The promotion, the closing, the last tuition check, the sale. And by the second week you are standing in the middle of it, looking around for the next thing, and a little ashamed that you are.

Picture a man who spent 7 years building a small business. More than one man I know is some version of him. He built it the way you would build a house if you had never built a house before, and he made the right kind of mistakes, and it grew. Then he sold it, for a number that meant his children would be fine.

Six months after the sale you would expect him to be radiant. He is something else. He has the thing he had worked toward since his 20s, and he is trying to decide what to do with his afternoon. He has not slept well in weeks. The worst thing, he will tell you, is that there is no next thing. He had thought there would be a next thing.

There was a next thing. He just did not know what it was yet.

Something gets the entrepreneur out of bed and makes the teenager drive with the windows down on a summer night. It is what made him build. It is one shape of the hunger the Preacher is describing, the longing for possibility, and it carries its own fear: the closed door, the road narrowing at 50 without your noticing. What keeps him awake 6 months after the sale is that he has finished, and there is no horizon yet.

The mistake most people make with that feeling is to treat a quest like a goal. A goal has a finish line, and when you reach it, the goal is accomplished. A quest does not really ever end. When the longing is not satisfied, people decide something has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. In this life, under the sun, the longing is not going to be satisfied.

C. S. Lewis put it plainly: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

So the wanting he feels 6 months after the sale does not mean he built the wrong thing. He was made for more than a business could hold. The longing is a gift. It is why he built the business, and there is a next thing he cannot see yet. In the meantime he has an afternoon, and the Preacher has advice for afternoons: eat your bread, do your work, enjoy the people at your table.