I never used to be intimidated by the future. I mean, there is a way these things are done. You go school, you go to college, you get a job. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. Along the way, you make friends for a lifetime/find the love of your life/discover your passion, whichever. I know how these things work. I’ve seen movies.
And we laugh at the naiveté of that last sentence but we continue to live our lives like they’re stories. What is making a five year plan but plotting out the next few chapters? What is living in the moment but describing the scenery? In the end, we all get carried along with the plot of our life no matter who we think the author is. Some people are just more self-aware of the writing than others.
Yes, I’ve been watching a lot of Community, but I think the point holds beyond the story metaphor. We talk about being on a journey or walking a path. There’s direction implied. There’s destination. There’s purpose. In a way, there’s control— we chose this path and it is our feet that carry us along it. There’s responsibility too, a real sense in which we need to choose the right path. Or choose the path that’s right for us. That part’s gotten a little hazy in recent times.
The path metaphor is what drives my intimidation about the future. If you have to pick a path, you can be wrong and what if I’ve picked the wrong path? What if I’ve wasted years of my life? What if I’ve missed out on the person I could have been, the person who is happier than me in several very specific ways? What if I’ve missed out on the life I could have had?
I can’t think like that anymore. It’s not helpful to me. And I know that anybody can what-if until the cows come home but I obsess over potential futures and potential futures that have passed. It’s a constant itch I have to scratch or a pebble in my shoe or a tick box I can never check because there’s no way of knowing the future and there’s no way of knowing what could have been. The journey of my life will always end with me sitting on the dock of a bay, wasting time.
The two most impactful prayers in my life have been the Prayer of St. Francis and the Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan tradition. They’re both beautiful sets of words with so many thoughts that you can pull out of them, but what’s important here is the language of use in the poems. “Lord, make me an instrument,” “Let me be employed for thee or set aside for thee,” the idea in the words is that we are tools that can be shaped and formed, instruments used for a purpose. I don’t want to mechanize humanity or the world around us, I don’t want to make us cogs in a machine, but I do find the language of use freeing.
The best thing I can do with my time is to make myself into the best tool possible, to train myself and my heart to hear the needs of others and respond, to get better at responding, and to be willing to be used in every situation I’m pulled into. I don’t need to think about where I’m meant to be. I can think instead of which place, which choice, which opportunity is going to help me be the best version of myself I can be. I don’t necessarily care where the future version of me lands, as long as she can do a good thing when she gets there.
Here’s to doing our best to work in it too.
I find it helpful to think about life as a story, or a series of stories, but I suppose I would, storyteller that I am by profession. Still, The Doctor's lines affirm that 'we're all stories in the end, just make it a good one, eh?' :) Humans certainly do tell stories as a core of our being, so it makes sense to think of ourselves or our lives as stories. And how many stories follow the structure of the hero's path or way ... so very storied, in our living and our making sense of the living. Thanks for your ponderings.
ReplyDeleteI definitely resonate with the idea of our lives as stories (and also with so much of your writing!) and how stories help us make sense of our lives. As an organizing principle for my life, I'm not sold, but I do find stories so valuable, maybe so much so that I needed to get out of that mindset of a minute. We'll see how it pans out. The Doctor's usually pretty on point about stuff like this :D
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