Ambition is a dirty word if you grew up in the Midwest in a Norwegian-American family with the spoken-and-unspoken message, “Don’t get the big head,” or Janteloven, as it's called in Norway, a colloquialism that means, essentially, You’re not to think you’re special or better than others.

No surprise I’m uneasy with the word “ambition,” that is, ambition in the traditional sense of striving and determination to get ahead, to be known far and wide for who you are and what you do.

But I can get behind a notion of ambition as finding the truest possible you, and aligning it closer and closer with what you do and how you live.

In her compelling book, Lab Girl, Hope Jahren, also a Midwesterner of Norwegian descent, writes, “We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.”

I’ve written about regret here before, and feeling like a seed that waited too long. Yet I tried several avenues of expression before I found writing in my mid-thirties, by accident, at a workshop designed for elementary school teachers. I sang in the choir. I learned how to sew. I acted in Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. I played the piano and the violin. I took art classes. I was a Montessori teacher.

My determination to write intensified during the decade and a half my dad’s memory faded, which I see now in a series of stills: the time Mom put post-its next to our faces on the family photo so he could remember our names; the time he packed all his belongings into a hamper and tried to run away from home; on the way to the lake, long after his father had died, when he sat up in the passenger seat of the car with a look of pure delight on his face, and said, “My daddy will be so excited to see me!”

Dad never seemed to feel he excelled at anything and maybe this was Janteloven at work. One time he said being a doctor was little more than being a mechanic (Not to disparage mechanics! He was actually a pretty good mechanic outside his doctor work.). Another time he said he would never pass the increasingly strict requirements to get into medical school if he had to do it again—as though his long, successful career had been a fluke.

As Dad got sicker it wasn’t his work as a doctor he mentioned with pride, anyway, it was his teaching at the medical school, a career sideline. On my visits home, he’d pull out a file of old student evaluations and point out comments, especially those remarking he was funny. He left a note on the file that I found after he died that said, “Keep for the kids.”

Dad was dependable, stubborn and modest, but “funny” is not the first adjective that comes to mind when I think of him. I can only vaguely recall that he collected jokes, admired entertaining people, and listened to Prairie Home Companion for humor tips.

Inside this non-talkative man there was apparently a comedian dying to get out. I think he liked to cultivate his funny side and bring it into his work as a doctor, into family life and to social interactions. Teaching was the stage from which he could realize his ambition.

I find it interesting that Dad, a doctor, found his medium in teaching, and I, a teacher, find mine in writing. I suppose teaching allowed him to hold forth for a change. Writing is a way to know myself better, like walking or therapy. It’s where I sing and act and get to think I’m special.

In the file cabinet with the detritus from my years of teaching and writing, it’s the writing I’ll flag for my son, Ingo.

I guess that’s what I call ambition.