Living and Learning Non-Linearly
Some random thoughts on the weird and twisty path to who we become
Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.
—Inferno, Dante Alighieri (translation by John Ciardi)
Ah…life’s journey. Fun stuff. Kierkegaard tells us life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. But what does he know?
I wonder sometimes: does “understand” mean there’s a shape and a meaning and a purpose to life that we can finally glean in its final moments? Or does it mean that in those final moments we realize there was never any meaning or purpose or shape at all?
It’s possible that the moments of our life are just moments—beads on a string—and that they don’t “add up” to anything. Stories and lives aren’t the same, after all. Stories have an arc and a shape that have been formed by an author. They build towards an ending that’s satisfying to readers because it resolves and completes all that has come before it. Lives are just…lives. Is our purpose in life to build towards a happy ending, or just to have as long and happy a middle as we can manage?
We seem to be addicted to stories, perhaps more now than at any previous point in our history. Life, love, politics, the news—scripted shows, unscripted but heavily manipulated “reality” shows—everything has to conform to the rise and fall of narrative structure. We must struggle. We must overcome. We must have a stirring soundtrack playing underneath the action at all times.
In stories, every action leads inexorably to the next action. In life, crazy shit has a way of just happening. If the laws of cause and effect were ironclad and reliable, we’d be able to predict every outcome of every situation. But we can’t. We make bets. And sometimes, even when the odds look really good, we lose. Random, crazy things happen in life, in ways we’d never accept in fiction. This is why writers who craft “based on a true story” narratives have to warp the true parts to make the story parts more satisfying. The guy who wants to meet the queen can’t just stumble blindly around the palace until he finds her bedroom (which is what actually happened); he has to case the joint, plan the break-in, and work with the finesse of a cat-burglar. In life, sometimes, the guy who doesn’t plan gets to meet the queen, and the guy who plans meticulously gets caught.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t make plans for ourselves and our children, or prepare for the future we want, Of course we should. I’m just saying we need to make room for the random and the unpredictable, and give them some respect. Maybe the good preschool gets your child into the good magnet school. But maybe it doesn’t—and a kid they meet in the regular old school becomes hugely important in their life. Maybe majoring in Business instead of Art makes a young graduate more employable. But maybe it doesn’t—maybe the investment bank snaps up the Art major and leaves the Business major at the curb, because this week, right now, they’re about to manage a big M&A project that involves art galleries, and they’d love to have a smart young analyst on board who has experience in art. When humans make decisions, instead of leaving them to algorithms, unpredictable and wacky things can happen.
Maybe our goal should be to cast our net widely, pull in as much knowledge and experience as we can, and not worry so much about what it’s all going to add up to. Maybe the act of learning and living—seeing cool things, doing cool things, learning cool things—is what it all adds up to. The “crazy shit” that gets edited out of a story because it hinders forward narrative progress might actually be the best and most interesting parts of life. And things that appear at first to be side streets may turn out to be the most important parts of our journey.
I was an English major in the early 1980s, and I studiously avoided thinking about what it would prepare me for, mostly at the encouragement of my parents, who had been forced to behave otherwise by their parents. I was told that the purpose of going to college was to become a well-rounded and well-educated human being, and that I could worry about career choices afterwards. So, that’s what I did.
Of course, it being the early 1980s, few of my friends were thinking the way I was. Yuppies were ascendant, and “Greed is Good” became the rallying cry two years after I graduated. I spent most of my spare time doing theater, which I intended to pursue after graduation, though I had no idea how that was going to happen. I discovered at the end of my senior year that most of my theater pals had other things in mind. They went off to law school or business school or entry-level jobs in big corporations, leaving me looking around in a panic, saying, “Was I supposed to have a plan?”
This is what led me, in desperation, to respond to a late-night TV ad for a six-week bartending program that guaranteed job placement. Yes, I am a graduate of the Georgia School of Bartending. And I did get a job upon graduation, at a suburban ribs restaurant and lounge. It was a nightmare, and I didn’t last long. But the day I was fired, I got snapped up by my college’s theater department to serve as their new Artistic Director’s assistant. I happened to stop by the office the day I was fired. It happened to be the day that new director had arrived from England. I happened to be available. And so, I ended up working there for the next two years, before I went off to graduate school to get my MFA in theater.
When I came back, I did volunteer work for a local theater as their literary manager, reading all the plays no one had asked for and no one had any intention of producing. I thought that was my entry level” job in theater, preparing me for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, I needed a paying job, so my mother hooked me up for an interview with a friend who was the headmaster of a brand new, very alternative high school. Because it was private, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a teaching certification—or any experience. All the headmaster cared about was that I knew literature, could write well, and liked kids.
Eventually, I ended up leaving teaching to run a small theater company. Then, when I needed a better-paying job, I worked for a small but growing division of an education company as a curriculum writer. And even though I walked in with zero business experience (beyond ringing up drinks at the bar), I discovered that years of directing plays had prepared me well for managing creative and collaborative teams, and I was able to grow and rise quickly within the company. I happened to have what they happened to need at the moment when they happened to need it and not have it.
Thus began my career in education, which is now in its 30th year.
Master plan? Random chance? You tell me.
Personally and professionally, I am the sum total of the things I’ve learned and the things I’ve done—the choices I’ve made and the choices I’ve run away from. Was there a map somewhere, leading me inexorably to where I stand today? I don’t think so. But there was certainly a personality or identity informing my actions and choices from day to day. I did what I did because I was who I was—sometimes with a plan in mind and sometimes in response to a random chance. So maybe identity plus opportunity creates the map. And maybe there’s a virtuous or vicious cycle involved, where identity informs choices and choices reinforce identify, on and on throughout your life—in ever-tightening, ever-more-restrictive circles.
This reminds me of the “ladder of inference” idea, where your biases limit your intake of data and the conclusions you’re liable to reach—which further limits the data you’ll be willing to consider next time. We think that putting on blinders and being single-minded helps us focus on chasing our goals, but maybe, in reality, those blinders get tighter and tighter over time, and our goals becomes smaller and smaller, with any other options being ruled out by becoming invisible to us.
Maybe there’s another way of looking at it. Instead of climbing a ladder or walking a road or aiming at a target—all of those linear ways of thinking—maybe we should be more circular, more holistic, more…as my parents said when talking about college…rounded.
There’s a Japanese concept called Ikigai, which translates loosely as, “the reason why you get up in the morning.” It’s not depicted as an end point in a linear process. It’s usually represented by a Venn diagram:
I think that’s very interesting. It’s not an end-point; it’s an intersection-point. But “pursuit” is still part of the dialogue. I’ve heard people talking about Ikigai as a way of helping you think about what career you should look for: find the one thing that does all of this for you, and you’re golden. Another goal; another destination. But maybe that’s not possible for everyone. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to “get” anywhere. Maybe the goal should be to make sure that each circle is represented in your life, is present in your life somewhere. Maybe a job doesn’t have to connect all of the things; maybe it’s your whole life that does.
The world is wide and weird and hard to predict. Something in our peripheral vision or down a side street could be the thing that ends up being most valuable to us. As Kierkegaard told us, we can’t really know what the journey means until it’s over…if it means anything at all, beyond making a journey.
If that’s true, maybe we don’t actually awake in a deep wood midway through life’s journey, having strayed from the straight path. Maybe the waking up is when we realize there was no path in the first place.