When we look back, we think our lives form patterns; every event starts to look logical, as if something—or Someone—has mapped out all our steps (and missteps). …Do you call that fate or just happenstance? I don’t know. …Once upon a time, I would have said we choose our paths at random: this happened, then that, hence the other. Now I know better.
Stephen King, Revival
There are forces.
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, pg. 134
…and all along, from the beginning of his conscious life, the persistent feeling that the forks and parallels of the roads taken and not taken were all being traveled by the same people at the same time, the visible people and the shadow people, and that the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world, for the real
Paul Auster, 4321, pg. 863
also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was no better or worse than any other road, but the torment of being alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, traveling toward an altogether different place.
But it really doesn’t matter what we believe. It seems it won’t stop the man who thinks this life is guided by the life he thinks he had before, or the gypsy who swears by the queens in her tarot pack. And it’s hard to change the mind of the high-strung woman who lays responsibility for all her actions at the feet of her mother, or the lonely guy who sits in a folding chair on a hill in the dead of night waiting for the little green men. Amid the strange landscapes that have replaced our belief in the efficacy
Zadie Smith, White Teeth, pg. 419
of the stars, Millat’s is not such odd terrain. He believes the decisions that are made, come back. He believes we live in circles. His is a simple, neat fatalism: What goes around comes around.
Frost began: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry that I could not travel both…” Not only did the roads diverge, but so has analysis of this most popular American poem. Cited in more valedictory talks than any other, and promoted as a recommendation to pursue the more risky and unknown over the safe and easy, it has been mostly misunderstood. The road that Frost eventually chose to follow was not the road less traveled. It was simply the road not taken. So, it’s not actually about what Frost did, but what he didn’t do. The message here is really that there are many roads we can choose to follow. And, to pursue one route over another can perhaps be life-changing. But, most likely until we travel down that particular road, we may not be able to tell if the journey has been beneficial and impactful or not.
When it comes to leading one’s life, there are obviously a multitude of possibilities, of choices, of ways to navigate a course thru the years between birth and death. Do we really have a choice about how our life proceeds? Will we honestly be able to say at some point what Francis Sinatra crooned: “I did it my way”? Or, that we “planned each charted course”, as Ol Blue Eyes put it? Is the course we are following really chosen by us—or, simply allotted to us by chance?
Do most of us just spend a life careening from one situation to the next, being buffeted by forces, known and unknown? Are we the masters of our own destiny, as some would have us believe—or, do things just happen to us and we simply accept them as part of a natural course of events? At some point in our lives, as rational beings, we may begin to question the manner in which our life has unfolded. If we are truly “spiritual”, in the most real sense of the word, we may feel that it is simply all due to God’s plan. That is certainly one, possible conclusion. And, it may not only be the most comforting way to look at it, but will actually turn out to be the case in the end. However, since there’s no way to offer conclusive proof at the moment, we may have to consider other possibilities.
Certainly, starting out in our young lives, we often had a picture of either what we wanted to do, or to become, or the places we wanted to see. We had hopes and dreams that we held out as objectives to achieve. And then through no fault of our own, it seemed, life itself got in the way of attaining those goals. Here are a few examples of young men starting out gung ho in life, with great expectations. Like so many, however, their expectations were replaced by reality:
At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you’d make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and you make it your own.
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, pg. 253
and,
Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world’s wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings.
John Banville, The Sea, pgs. 44-45
Events “happened” in the course of our lives, and we attempted to make the necessary course corrections. And though we may have had to alter our plans, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, just different than we may originally have envisioned it. In addition, having to make those decisions probably helped us develop some maturity and forced us to learn how to deal with unexpected occurrences. So, not a bad thing at all.
Perhaps, though, we may look back on the living that we’ve already done and have some regret that we were not more decisive about reaching certain goals, making it happen, “getting ‘er done”. These thoughts from Julian Barnes capture what I’m alluding to:
What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realized? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with every one as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, pg. 155
Also, we may think that we were choosing the mature route, while perhaps being more interested in protecting ourselves. Again, from Barnes:
but time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, pg. 102
My thoughts go back to a guy I worked with at a major company in the ’70s. I’ll refer to him as “Joe Morrisson”. That’s obviously not his real name, but I’m changing the name to protect the innocent. Actually, I’m not even too sure how innocent Joe really was; I had my doubts at the time. Certainly some of his behavior fell into the questionable category.
But, I bring up Mr. Morrisson because, to me at least, he fit the description of a guy who had some talent, but always seemed to be not much more than a “survivor”. And, I’m not using that term here in a positive sense. He was the vice-president of sales and marketing at a $125 million dollar HVAC manufacturer—-which was certainly a good-sized company forty some years ago. He’d been given the job of VP by the president, Gene (not-his-real-name-either) Balducci, over the other candidate being considered, Tom (I’m-sure-that-you-already-knew-this-would-not-be-his-real-name) Mackey.
Tom was smart, thoughtful, steady, a team player and a natural marketing guy who saw the big picture. OTOH, Joe was a former national sales manager who could at times be loud, obnoxious and often seemingly unprepared when it came to planning and organization. He was liked well enough by the sales force, but I personally never saw him as much of a leader. Most of us thought that Mackey would get the VP job. So did Mackey. When he didn’t, he left for greener pastures. Our company was weaker for his loss.
Morrisson was a guy who survived because he was good at—or appeared to be good at—finding his way around troublesome situations, and avoiding areas of the business that demanded thoughtful consideration. Putting those decisions off until another day. Kicking the proverbial can down the road as it were. And, if circumstances, or the president, forced him into making a decision, it usually turned out to be a shoot-from-the-hip maneuver with very little critical thought behind it.
I used to think that the word “survivor”, particularly in the business world, was a positive description. You know, take some hits along the way, but jump back up, persevere, keep your dignity and eventually achieve a measure of success in your career. If it meant having to take two steps back in order to take three steps forward, then the net result was still forward progress. A career could be built on that approach.
But, with Joe, and men like him, it just seemed to me that here was a guy in retreat, and giving ground. No real stomach for the fight. I’ll concede that everyone can’t be a hero or a superstar, but nobody should ever be comfortable with just settling. At whatever level a person is operating, there must be at least a modicum of pride, and a feeling of self worth. As I said, Joe Morrisson had some God-given talent, but much of his behavior bordered on the cowardly.
Now, this may seem a harsh depiction of a fellow human being. But, for the most part, I don’t think that my observations and conclusions are too far off. Also, from a personal standpoint, Morrison was not only not a friend of mine, or even a dependable ally—but, he often worked against me in the corporate setting. Yes, purposely undermining my efforts. Evidently, he thought that I had to be an adversary since I was in the home office and he was out in the field. At the time, I attributed his behavior to an apparent lack of confidence and the doubts that he must have had about his self worth. At any rate, even back then I knew it was his problem, not mine. Despite my reservations about the man, I still did my job, and supported his efforts when called for.
Which leads me to the following description, also from Barnes, about a character who seems to begin where Joe Morrisson was all those years ago—and illustrates what a steady descent into the abyss might look like:
Then I thought more about Adrian. From the beginning, he had always seen more clearly than the rest of us. While we luxuriated in the doldrums of adolescence, imagining our routine discontent to be an original response to the human condition, Adrian was already looking farther ahead and wider around. He felt life more clearly, too—even, perhaps, especially, when he came to decide that it wasn’t worth the candle. Compared to him, I had always been a muddler, unable to learn much from the few lessons life provided me with. In my terms, settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more genuine remorse—a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful it was.
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, pg. 109
So, is this where my former co-worker had ended up? Did he go from bad to worse during the intervening years between then and now? Did he lose everything—his wife, his family, his friends? Did he end up hating himself, pitying himself? Initially, I might have thought that’s how this would play out. But, then I decided recently that I would google the real Joe, and I came across his obituary from a little over a year ago.
It was quite a nice tribute to the man. He had “lived an amazing, full life.” Was an “ambitious go-getter with unrelenting positive energy.” He’d done a tour of duty in the Air Force during the Korean War. Then, he started his career as an HVAC salesman, “rising up through the ranks to become VP of sales and marketing.” He had been a “devoted husband and proud father of five kids.” His favorite hobby was golf and his most favorite teams were the Bears and the Cubs. And, finally, Joe “lived every day of his life with a spirit, passion and enthusiasm that would not be denied. And all who crossed his path were the better for it.”
Well, I had crossed Joe’s path 45 years earlier, and as you could probably already tell, I didn’t necessarily feel the better for it. Nor did it seem to me way back then that this would be a guy who ended up being so revered. And, while obituaries can many times be based on saying as much good about a person as possible (we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead), most eulogies do, in fact, tend to accentuate the positive. I can only hope that the words expressed over me will be as kind, uplifting and inspiring.
I’m thinking that maybe after I parted ways with Joe, he had a eureka moment, some insight, a revelation out of the blue that led him to a major turnaround in his life. Or maybe, he was simply never the guy I judged him to be in the first place. Whatever the incentive or the reason, I’m kind of glad that Joe ended up where he did.
So, because I try to look for the positive, for the silver lining, I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, in the decade or two after I last saw Joe, perhaps he had an epiphany and suddenly saw things more clearly than ever before, saw his rightful place in the world and just finally figured it all out. Maybe he said to himself what Robert Pirsig had stated in his 1974 classic:
You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, pg. 149
Resonance 