I awoke this morning with an allegory playing out in my mind. Like a little skit. But less like a movie and more like a photograph.
It’s the feeling. The feeling that captures some truth about one situation in life; and the image is of how it feels to be caught in that circumstance.
In particular I woke thinking about the way we end up doing something for a living in life.
It … I… don’t believe that, by en large, most people “find” their vocation and follow it (revisit JC’s ‘follow your bliss’). I believe we (I say we because that is the group I count myself in) find that one thing leads to the next, more or less organically, and that what we end up doing for a living is somewhat the effect of serendipity. Somehow you gain experience in something, and that leads to more experiences in that field, and before you know it you’ve been in that field for what would amount to a career.
Yes, I realize that there are plenty of exceptions to that model; many people go to school to study a topic and spend the rest of their lives doing work in that field. There are also a fair number of people who make up their minds that they are going to do XYZ in life, and set about making it happen, credentials or not.
So maybe I should reframe my original statement to say: “I feel like the way my professional experience has come into being almost against my will – in a process that is more analogous to serendipity and happenstance than by design”.
And that may be why I feel so vexed by these diametrically opposed points of view about how a career “should” come into being. There is on the one hand the totally planned (or fanatic) approach, that states that only outcome XYZ will be accepted and ALL ELSE gets pushed out of the way until that outcome is achieved. And there is the opposite approach that states that lives, and the careers they happen to develop along the way, should flow, from moment to moment, from thing to thing.
— let me make an aside here to say: I am not trying to describe this second approach as one of pure unhinged, fickle, chance. Not at all. Once a particular kind of thing begins to happen in your experience the more likely related things are to come. Once you happen to get into the social activist scene, the more likely more social activism, or something closely related, will appear before you).
And here is the point that impales me about this dichotomy of approaches to work and making a living:
I believe many (if not most) people who find themselves cast about in the currents of life, and find themselves on firm footing by chance on some outcropping of stability (let’s call this their first experience in what might become a career should it be put to good use) – have a particular opinion on what kind of activity would make them happiest (let’s discount here, for the sake of expedience, the notion that some people simply wish to do nothing of social value, and therefore would not have a career of any sort should it not be required of them in order to feed their carcasses).
NOW – whether their predilection in work activity and the terra firma of a job they happen to at first find themselves on are of the same nature – that is not assured.
There is, in me, two clearly opposite beliefs about life, living, and the way to encounter it.
One is the open handed way, the other is the closed handed way (those metaphors don’t mean much, they merely set the stage for the nature of the encounters between The Living and Life. I don’t mean to invoke references to martial arts).
Here is the fact: LIFE HAPPENS.
Right away the next sentence, or how you have interpreted the above statement of fact describes your native (intuitive, learned, assumed, subconscious) understanding of that fact. You either believe Life happens TO you, or life happens WITH you. There are two easy to understand postures – one is antagonistic to life (life must be tamed and beaten into the forms we want it to take) and the other is of an accompaniment.
In the first simplistic model, Life is raw and untamed, and it is the role of the very humanity in people to collar it, to make it conform to the dictums of what it should look like at the time. I would say this is the quintessential (archaic) western view. Along with the every day circumstances we find ourselves in, the attitude gets extended to the surroundings in toto – geography, flora and fauna. All must be subsumed under the highest understanding of order available to the practicioner at the time. In this view the individual lives life as an agent of rationality in an irrational cosmos.
The other model, in the most simplistic application, takes life one moment at a time, and tries not so much to mold it to the opinions or views of the individual, but tries to achieve some harmony with what is encountered. In the worst application this mode of living can seem to be totally unmoored and disjointed, everything only having worth in the moment, no forward thinking or consideration of the extended ramifications of an action are taken. “All that counts is what is right in front of me”.
This morning I envisioned a person, buffeted by incredible gusts of wind trying to cross a waist-deep creek with a swift and erratic current. Starting from one bank, not being able to see the other, and meaning to land on the other side on exactly one place -neither upstream or downstream of there…
That is what it feels like to me, to try to navigate the processes of life that lead from one thing to the next, and in time form the arc of a career.
Do you struggle and push all other aspects of your life out of the way until you arrive at the other shore, where you want to be? Do you incur the costs of doing that, gracefully? Do you loose your friends, years of connections with your immediate family, knowing that once you arrive on the other side some of those things can be rebuilt? New friends made, new partners found among the crowd on that same path? When do you realize that there comes a time in your life when you’ve formed bonds with other people that you’d not be willing to sacrifice to get to another place?
Or do those bonds take precedence, and you remain where you’ve found the close group of people who you love, and conform yourself to the reality of making a life and a living wherever they are socially? And when do you realize that just because you choose to stay put, to stay loyal, to remain in place, connected and available, it does not mean that your peers, those you love, will follow suit? And what of you when they don’t?
It, strangely, occurs to me that this is the classic model of the prisoner dilemma, so famously played out by fledgling AI’s in game theory tourneys since … Should you trust your cohort, or antagonize them?
Is there a usable universal answer?
No.
That’s why it’s called Game Theory, not Game Law.
So now, you find yourself midstream, slammed by gale force winds from every side, groping your way over slippery rocks with your bare feet, and now, now you have a raft trailing downstream of you, tethered by a rope tied around your chest… and this is the scenario you find yourself in, trying to cross that tempestuous stretch between one relatively stable bank and another. Not just trying to reach the other side, but specifically trying to set foot on exactly the point where the lifestyle and demands made upon you by your career coincide in the ways you home they will…
Keep up the faith, keep up the good work, and trudge on.
Because staying in the middle of the stream is certain failure, not only to you, but to those who are onboard your little life raft downstream.