The Garden of Forking Paths

The title refers to a story by Jorge Luis Borges, a favorite writer of mine. His ideas are big and crazy, and his stories tend to be more investigations of philosophical or psychological phenomena than they are anything else. The concept behind this particular story is a multifracted view of causality and history. Something akin to the old Star Trek idea of multiple universes created at each critical point in time, in this story we hear a theory that not only does a different history exist for each action or choice that can be made, but they are, in fact, all true and have all occurred. The story shares the title of a novel written by a character, a novel that does not have a plot in which one event occurs after another but in which the same event is played out endless times, each having a slightly diverging chain of events. People thought he had gone mad. They may have had a point.

Does that make any sense? Probably not. I started to write yet another self-pitying post about how I couldn't see my future clearly and I didn't have enough direction and blah blah blah. Now I'm sparing you.

In lieu of that, I thought I'd relate a few ideas from a quite nifty book I've been perusing. Back on Thursday I was feeling kind of floaty, not having direction or even knowing which way to lean. I looked at a few books about creative-types and jobs, looking for some way to kick-start a career right now. I didn't find that but I did find Creating a Life Worth Living, by Carol Lloyd. The subtitle is, "A practical course in career design for artists, innovators, and others aspiring to a creative life." I was a bit shocked at how close some of her examples were to things I had thought and gone through. I also liked the practical aspects of some of the ideas and exercises she was presenting, so I picked it up. It is unlike anything else I've read and suggests ways of creating habits and making plans that could encompass a career, which I'd desperately like to figure out right about now. With God's help, I think this can be really useful.

I figure I can share with you some of the activities and such I'm going through as I work on it (at a rate of a chapter a week). I won't reveal everything, 'cause I don't want to take away Lloyd's livelihood, but I figure sharing my answers and ideas with this select group wouldn't hurt her sales too much.

The first thing she suggests is to do a bit of free association with some terms, seeing what we think of them before we even start. Since these are off-the-cuff and unedited, I hope you'll forgive my cliches and dullness.

Career: The thing you do for your lifetime. The job you love and that you want to be in. A real, meaningful vocation that both fulfills you and has a valuable effect on the world. A career has to have lasting social value; your dedication to it, your gaining skill in your craft, and your ability to do your job at a masterly level makes what you do worthwhile and meaningful.

Job: The thing you do to pay the bills. A kind of work done only to get by. Most people will always just have a job, seeing their "real" life outside of their work. I want to have my life include my work, which it certainly does not now. No one is invested in a job any further than their own performance; they care about the company only in the vaguest of ways, perhaps out of a sense of owed loyalty (“I have to care about the hospital because I work there and we provide a valuable service"), but never because one truly feels connected to the work. We all have a multitude of jobs in life, mostly leading nowhere in and of themselves.

Work: Stuff that is hard to do. Opposite of “play” and usually no fun. A series of actions that are required to accomplish anything worthwhile. Though work is often dull and painful, it is the only way to gain those lasting achievements that are meaningful. I have a negative association with work, mainly I think because I was trained to believe I ought to be dedicated to it, devote myself to it, and thrive because of it, and I don't do any of those things. I have a gut feeling that real men work hard and often and take a kind of pride in their work, lending meaning to their lives. A thing I wish I could make myself do more enthusiastically and willingly.

Art: Expression that has some depth of meaning and beauty. Our God-given sense of beauty helps us recognize art as separate from simple expression. In many ways, a cultural construct that tries to tell us which forms of expression are most valuable, often changing with the fluctuating tastes of the elite. I’m torn about how I feel about art. On the one hand I find the concept incredibly valuable, and I think some training of the senses and learning are needed to distinguish great art; I strongly disagree with my students when they insist to me that art is “whatever you want it to be.” On the other hand, “art” has so often been hijacked in the service of either politics or the avant-garde of cultural elites that it is too commonly rarified and too narrowly defined. We need new definitions of art that will keep it from losing all meaning but also free it from odd, constricting notions foisted on us by those who would push filth simply because it’s taboo. We need an art that has standards but is accessible.

Plan: The thing I don’t have and the action I don’t do very well. I love to create elaborate plans in my mind, but they rarely come to fruition as I had imagined and I’m poor at dealing with alterations along the way. I always desire a plan and usually need one, yet I always consider plans as the tools of the narrow-minded, dull, and mundane. I definitely have bought into the image of a real “artist” being a free spirit and who doesn't need a plan; he just follows his Muse and greatness is created. I feel far too bound to plans, because I do so badly without them on the small scale; I like to have a plan for the day and I get out of sorts when I can’t follow it. This makes me very sad-—what a pathetic person I must be to get my nose bent out of shape because of minor alterations in my day. Yet I have to acknowledge that issue somewhere; I’m only spontaneous on the very small or very large scale. I’m thrown off if I was planning on going to dinner then the movies and later have to reverse the order, but I didn’t have much trouble throwing over my life and dragging Joanna off to Toronto for what we thought would be about five years. And we had no plans at all as to where to live or how we would pay the bills other than for me to go to school. So plans always seem annoying and pedestrian, yet I’ve been bound by the basest of them.

Goal: A thing I don’t reach. I don’t think I’ve ever really reached a goal I’ve set. I’ve accomplished some things, but they never feel like the culmination of work in that direction. I’ve set myself so many goals that even when I do accomplish something, I only compare it to the vast array of those things I have not reached and it fades into insignificance. This is stupid, I know, yet it happens anyway. I now fear goals, because I’m tired of failing to reach them. I suppose subconsciously I’ve decided that if I don’t set them in the first place, I can’t fail. A goal is an object immeasurably far in the distance that never gets any closer; then you give it up and it disappears entirely.

Huh.

That's it from me tonight; if any other personal writing assignments come up, I'll be sure to share. I know you're looking forward to that.