How it all turns out
The difference between waiting and simply sitting is a state of mind. (Image by Piyapong Saydaung)
Like most of us, I don’t like spoilers.
I don’t even like to read the blurb on the back of a book, if I can avoid it. I don’t want to watch the movie trailer.
I want to dive into a world and experience it on its own terms. I want to enjoy the gradual unspooling of the narrative.
Before you’ve dug into the story, though, a spoiler doesn’t mean very much. Turning to the last page of the book doesn’t really give you a lot of information. You don’t know who these people are or why the way things ended up for them might be joyful, tragic, or poignant. You have no emotional investment or context.
This is not so different from the experiences we have in real life. The point of going on a vacation isn’t to find out what happens. It’s the experience.
And the way we savor a vacation is, in itself, a model for the way that we might savor our entire lives.
I do understand and relate to the angst that people, especially young people, have about their lives and careers.
They want to know where they’re going to land. They want to discover how things are going to turn out in the end.
They want to find out what they were supposedly put on this planet to do and get started doing it.
But there are two reasons that this desperate desire for a definitive answer cannot be satisfied.
The first is that it’s just like knowing the punchline of a joke, the resolution of a plot line, or the solution to a math problem: The answer doesn’t mean anything on its own. Don’t you want to explore, uncover possibilities, and grow from the gradual, day-to-day unfolding of your life?
As Billy Joel put it in “Vienna”: “Slow down, you’re doing fine. You can’t be everything you want to be before your time.”
And the second reason you can’t just jump to the end to find out what you’re supposed to be doing and how it all turns out is that there is no end. There is no destination. There is no resolution. There is no destiny waiting for you — no one true future you’re predetermined to have. You are the one who constructs your future as a result of your choices.
You can’t skip to the end of the book because it hasn’t been written yet.
I know that if I gave that kindly advice to someone under the age of twenty-five, they’d roll their eyes and ask someone else’s opinion. I understand what an unsatisfying idea it is. But I believe that the notion that there is some ideal future out there that we’re on quest to discover is a damaging one that distorts our ability to find meaning in our lives as we live them. It leads to unnecessary dissatisfaction and frustration.
My own life has taken some very inefficient twists and turns. It certainly would have saved me a lot of time and hassle to know where I was going. But I never could have predicted where I would end up, and I appreciate it all the more for the difficulty I experienced along the way.
What’s more, I’m not done. I’m not complete. There’s more I want to do. This isn’t where I’ve been headed all along. This is just another leg of the journey. I can view that with impatience or acceptance, and I choose the latter.
It can be truly overwhelming, when we are young, to confront the infinite possibilities laid out in front of us. The intensity fades a bit as we get older, but the choices never end. There is never a right or wrong, and the paths still fork endlessly. The better you know yourself, the easier it is to make decisions, but there are always surprises. Nobody can tell you what you’re supposed to do. That might be terrifying, but in the end, it’s also liberating.
