The path not taken
My friend Carolyn always supplies me with great quotes, and this one has been taped above my computer for quite a while now:
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”–Joseph Campbell
Gulp. That’s an unsettling thought. It means you can’t just look at someone else’s life and copy it. I don’t get to be J.K Rowling or Oprah Winfrey or Nora Roberts, because guess what? Those lives are already taken. Plus there’s the fact that if you sign on to a life you have to take all the things that go with it, and maybe I don’t want that husband or those problems or to sleep with cats instead of dogs. So even if it were possible to step into someone else’s life, maybe that isn’t such a hot idea anyway.
But Campbell’s quote also means something else, and this is the part that gets my heart speeding. It means you can’t necessarily plan out your own life, even if it’s your nature and joy to plan everything.
But that can be a good thing, right? It’s possible that the best plan we can come up with is so puny compared to all the possibilities in store for us. And maybe the best gift we can give ourselves is to get out of the way of that. But how? Especially if you’re like Carolyn and me and a huge chunk of the population, living for our lists?
We all have goals. Maybe it’s as simple as I need to vacuum up all the cat hair tomorrow. Or it might be huge: I want to be a New York Times best-selling author. Next year. So where do goals and planning fit with Joseph Campbell’s caution about figuring out our lives on the fly? Should we really just sit back and let things unfold, and not try to have a hand in it?
There’s a study that came out recently (read a fun take on it in Meg Cabot’s diary) about why people are good at certain things. Here it is in a nutshell: You naturally love something, and that makes you want to spend time doing it. So you get better at that thing, which then makes you love it more. Makes complete sense, right? It matches our own experiences in life. I love peanut butter and jelly, so I make a fantastic pbj. I love banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, all sorts of sweets and baked goods, so I’ve been making them over and over for years and now I’m really skilled. But I can’t see myself ever figuring out how to cook squid or lamb, because those will never cross my lips (squid is too ugly, lambs are too cute).
But can’t we change? Take career choice, for example. Isn’t it possible that if I just decided one day that I want to be a doctor or astronaut, I could apply myself to those disciplines and get pretty far? Or would I lose interest before I got to a level of competence, because those careers really aren’t where my heart is?
It’s like me being a lawyer for those seven years. In the beginning it was fun and challenging and I worked really hard at being good at it, but after a while the real me started leaking out again. The real me likes movies about lawyers. The real me used to watch a soap opera with this beautiful, smart, sophisticated woman lawyer character who had a complicated love life and great clothes, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever admitted this to anyone before, but that’s actually the reason I went to law school. How dumb is that? But why is that any different from looking at a real person’s life and wishing you were them and not you?
So here’s our question for the day: Do we really make our own path with every step we take? Does my path get to include making a list of everything I want to accomplish, and spending my days trying to check them off one by one? Because that sure feels good to me, and it sounds like I’m supposed to pay attention to the things that feel right.
Should we plan or just live? Is it possible to live a completely spontaneous life? Do we even want that? Or is life better when we set our course and head in that direction? And what part do our natural inclinations play? If someone has always wanted to be a ballerina, shouldn’t she try it, even if she’s six-foot-ten and big boned?
What about you? Are you making your own path these days, or are you off on someone else’s adventure?
Technorati Tags: Goals, Resolutions, Lists, Planning, Life Lists, Motivation, Success, Meg Cabot, Joseph Campbell, Life
May 11th, 2006 at 10:22 am
If you’re going to choose a quote to live by, I think “On a scale from one to awesome, I’m super great!” is probably the best.
May 11th, 2006 at 10:27 am
Lizzie, love that!
May 11th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
There is definitely a positive mix to be had between planning and doing. I think the point is not to let the planning impede any spontaneous things that could come up. Life should be comfortable, and I know many people who need to feel like they have control over details in their lives. However, I also know that these same people can bring spontaneity into their lives, and do things on a whim, even though they have schedules and long-term planning and etc. Living by Carolyn’s quotation does not require giving up all of the lists. But, it is always good to remember that the things that you don’t plan in life can turn out to be spectacular.
May 11th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
In high school and college I at various times wanted to be a writer, a dancer, an artist. At various times I’ve dabbled in all those things. And those things are actually closest to the core of me.
Then I ended up doing stuff for a long time that was way apart from that core due to the needs of being a single mom. But I hated it.
I eventually got closer to my heart when a friend suggested that I turn my buying and selling antiques hobby into a full time business. Oh, cool, I could touch art and fine things. Closer, but the true core was still not being touched, since I wasn’t CREATING anything.
I decided to put up my own ecommerce website for my vintage business, and since I was (as all startups are) on a shoestring budget, I set out to learn website design so I could do my own. The rest is history. Now the antiques business is back to being a hobby (and I never have finished my own ecommerce site!) I get to write and create artistic things but I also get to do something that I didn’t know I loved until I started doing it– coding. And it is so much more creative than I ever expected it to be. I take disparate things and make them work together to create a harmonious whole. Accident? Maybe . . . I do know that I wouldn’t be nearly as happy as I am right now if I had listened to other people and not done this (you’re too old, you need to go back to school for that, you don’t have enough money to start up a business like that, programming requires math skills that you don’t have . . . etc etc etc.) Now if I could just get someone else to VOLUNTEER to do my “paperwork” . . . so I could spend all my time geeking out . . .