“The point, what I've got it down to, is there are only two questions worth asking:Why are we here, and what should we do about it while we are?”– John Lloyd
As a member of the current class of twenty-something's spelunking my way through these years, this question of calling/splashing has plunged itself deep within me since I left St. Olaf. A month after graduation I began working for a large healthcare software company in my home state of Wisconsin. I found things to like about the work and travel involved. I felt challenged, enjoyed my colleagues and put in good hours with good output. And then it started to feel stale. Would working here for five years lead me to happiness and fulfillment? I thought not and decided to make my first major detour of adulthood. After two years of full-time work, I quit my job in order to travel aimlessly through the Western U.S. and Asia for an indeterminate amount of time.
I'm currently a month into that trip and although it still can feel ostentatious when I describe what I'm doing to friends, family and strangers, I think it was the right move for me. To get away and exist in an unorganized way, divorced from the routine of an adulthood I had barely experienced, is totally worth the lack of income or certainty in what exactly it is I'm accomplishing each day. I know that “taking a year off” is classic Stuff White People Like and I decided against maintaining a blog of my own after more than a few friends jibed, “Oh, you're not going to start a blog about finding yourself on the road, are you?” But the fact is not having anything to do other than what I choose to do has jarred me out of the way I was thinking for the last two years. It is affording me the time needed to reflect, reconsider and reengage in the mission of moving forward.
The first step was to accept that I am who I am and the world is what it is. I have made the conclusion for myself that the healthiest way to consider existence is as a collaboration between two basic elements - chance and choice. Sam Harris explains in his book Free Will that “you can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.” His basic premise is that although we may have the ability to make choices, the situations we experience and how we arrive at them, as well as why we make the decisions we do, is all determined by a chaotic web of outside factors that we definitely do not choose or create. Chaos, though we would rather have order, is the stage on which we must act. It was by chance that at a certain time, in a certain place and with a certain set of circumstances, genes and socioeconomic factors, all of us became a living, breathing element of humanity. And this “luck of the draw” has a major influence on everything that follows. Being born a healthy, white, male citizen of the United States in 1988 meant a far different set of future opportunities than what one experiences if they are born an ethnic minority, lacking basic resources, in a time and place mired in violence and/or famine.
The element of chance continues to play a significant role throughout our lives, but I still think that the ability to choose A or B means we still have some power to construct our own identities. Choices we make are constantly altering our life's trajectory, and so with everything each of us does there is a slight bend and ripple to who we become.
Since chance is not under anyone's control, choice seems to be the element to consider closely. Choice is how we navigate through the dizzying amount of options the modern world provides us. Choice determines whether we talk to people we know via our smart phones when we find ourselves in social situations with people whom we don't know. Choices make things happen that would not have otherwise happened.
Choices we make are also vastly unequal in importance and differ in the level of conscious thought we employ while making them. Each of us engages in the repeated, physical tasks of daily life – choosing what to eat, what to wear, what to buy, when to set the alarm, or whether to set an alarm. There are also the more fluid and gradual choices that manifest into our goals, personalities and philosophies – deciding how to use our time and who to use it with, what to learn, what to believe, where to focus our energy and passion, when to move on to something else – decisions that we tinker with over an entire existence.
We all make millions of choices during our lifetimes and most of them are never considered again (many of them are not even consciously considered at the moment they are made – our subconscious brain is just that good). You will forget most of them, yet some choices will be so pivotal that the person you were set to become is completely rerouted into someone else. When I dropped I.B. chemistry in high school, it was unlikely that I would try again in college, and furthermore that I would ever become a physician. We all think about choices in the past we would like to change, imagining the different ways it would alter our current state. We think about the choices we can make now that will lead to the future we hope we hope to create. We always want to make the right choice, even though the amount of options available to the average citizen of the Western world makes the right choice harder to find and even more difficult to accept as the correct one once you have made it. Perhaps life is easier with a penchant for minimalism, eliminating the clutter of choices that are not truly important to happiness and are merely taking up time that you could be using to do things that actually matter to you.
I recently read the story of a man named Arthur Fields who spent fifty years taking pictures of people as they walked past him on the O'Connell bridge in Dublin, Ireland. He would take candid pictures of unsuspecting pedestrians and then attempt to sell them the instant color print, hopefully making enough money to buy film for the next day. This is how he supported his family and the reason he got out of bed each morning. Taking pictures was clearly what he loved and wanted to do. His sons claim he never even went on a vacation. He didn't take his camera to exotic locations, let alone find a different street in Dublin, for a span of time that resulted in over 180,000 photos. It would seem that this man had no second-thoughts about his choice in vocation, nor any reason to try something else. For fifty years, Arthur's career was immovable and unchanging.
I wonder if we all need to make a similar choice in order to feel fulfilled with how we use our allotted time on earth. Committing in such a complete way is a tricky decision to make. Where do we start? Most people have hobbies that inspire their quest for knowledge and skills, but there are also the jobs we do that absorb the most productive part of the day, some of which may have nothing to do with our actual passions. Can the thing you love also be the work you do? Clearly some people make this a reality, but still so many others are unable to find that happy balance. I don't know how to distill the fascinations I have with music, photography and writing into as pure a path as Arthur's yet, but this is what we all seem to be looking for as we drift through periods of employment and hobby. I think we are all determined to make our lives meaningful and that usually means finding a focus; being great at something is earned only after making many choices to first of all become better.
I visited Glacier National Park last week as part of one of the main goals of my trip to visit the majority of the national parks in the western U.S. and to strengthen my photography with the assistance of gorgeous landscapes and night skies unpolluted by light. Although my vehicle and current home, my mom's Roadtrek camper van, is both large and ornery about going up steep inclines, I decided to give Going-To-The-Sun Road a shot. Many switchbacks later, I made it to Logan's Pass with a few hours of daylight left. Feeling triumphant, I disembarked and found a hike to an overlook of Hidden Lake. I took to the path without pause. I counted the many people I passed who were descending back to the parking lot, their faces appearing pleased with what they had worked to see. I said hello to them as they walked by and they responded in kind. I passed other people, some much older than I, who were walking up the path with me. There were still others who had decided to stop halfway, laying on rocks, looking out over Logan's Pass and marveling at the beautiful scenery that had been carved by glaciers millions of years earlier.
When I reached the overlook, I joined others who were taking pictures and enjoying the view of the lake and the receding peaks beyond it. I watched as two young men judged a sign pointing to a further hike down to the water below, which stated that it was “very steep” and to “use caution.” They shrugged at each other confidently and continued on anyway. On the way back I joined a group of people taking pictures of a baby mountain goat and it's mother who were munching on grass a few feet from the trail. I noticed one man who I had passed going up retreating back down the trail to encourage his wife, who had decided to sit down short of the overlook, to come gawk at the goats with him. As I reached the parking lot I heard an old man say to his wife that the view was “so scenic and visually stunning – why do we need to walk up that mountain and sweat to enjoy what we can see right here!”
And so I noticed then that even on a single path there were still many choices to make. Even when there is a destination, something halfway there might feel better. Even when there is a sign telling you it's steep ahead, maybe it's still worth following. Even if a path is there in front of you, perhaps it isn't worth taking if you appreciate the view from where you are. And even when life seems vexing and the path isn't clearly marked and you wish you knew what to do, you always have the ability to live in the present moment and enjoy the small steps forward.
The lesson of mindfulness taught by the Buddha is very useful when I find myself wanting something to strive for and can feel that acute, aching anxiety because I don't know exactly what it is yet. To be mindful is to simply appreciate that you are alive, connected to the things happening around you and to be present and focused amongst it all. Rather than being lost in one cacophonous head-space, treating the world as an entity that you are a part of - rather than a separate actor in - can feel like a purer form of existence.
By practicing mindfulness through meditation and yoga, or at any time of day – standing in line, sitting on a bus, or in those moments when you feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do - you can actually choose to have a more peaceful outlook. I can choose to be me right now instead of thinking about a non-existent future-me. This leads to far less time worrying and far more time doing what feels good. I realize that a calling isn't necessarily something you can choose first and achieve second. And I think that if I feel happy (or unhappy, which is a necessary part of life) with what I'm doing now and have a sense that I'm moving in a positive direction, I can accept that I have no idea what I want to be doing in 2018, 2024, or 2050 (if I'm even here at that point).
And with all the chance and choice involved from now until then, it would always be guesswork.
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Jordan is a friend and fellow St. Olaf Class of 2011 grad. He was born and raised in Wausau, WI. His favorite job was the summer he delivered pizza. Kurt Vonnegut is the reason he loves reading and writing.
