Life at Sea

I’ve had a bad spat of self-indulgent wrangling – asking, “Who am I? Where am I? What am I” I feel like a senility ward escapee. Fact is such questions have no answers. The best we can do is to remember that we are already who we are becoming. We are, right now, who God made us to be.

I have felt some sort of self-imposed deadline to get my shit together and conform to something that society recognizes and can give a name to – a writer, an anthropologist, a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker. This is the same battle that I have been fighting for years. The law was an honorable and admirable profession, but it felt like trying to wear someone else’s skin.

The best I can do right now, and the best I may ever be able to do, is to call myself an explorer, of myself and of the world around me. But, my default setting is still linear. I insist on trying to live life horizontally.

We are taught, or else I have learned, that life should proceed along an unbroken course; each milestone linked in chain with the one before it. “I will go to college, get a degree, get a job using said degree, get married, buy a house, have children, contribute to the company’s 401(k), get promoted, have grandchildren, retire, and die.” Note that the corporate ladder is a straight line, in theory. The great secret is that this “ideal” works for very few of us; and usually only the least interesting of us at that.

The fact that we demand adherence to this life story only serves to perpetuate misery. I have seen friends, peers, and mentors struggle with the contortion required to fit this mould. Who does it benefit? It gives a degree of certainty to the less introspective of us, but also feeds our fear of the unknown.

We all start and end the same. The in-between time is what makes it interesting. We all know people who have chosen the path of least resistance from point A to point B, from birth to death. They are not living; they are merely surviving until their inevitable demise.

Conceptualize a life judged by something other than a timeline. What about a life with the sensuous contours of New York’s Guggenheim? What would a rhombazoidal life be like? If you lived a doughnut-shaped life, would you necessarily end up overweight?

I see my life like an ocean. There are unexplored and unexplorable depths. So too are there shallows; some polluted, others pristine and peaceful. Life exists in this sea in irregular clumps, in swirling schools and, occasionally, in isolation. It has no shape, only an infinite number of directions.

It is possible to transverse this sea directly, and with ease, along its surface, but you will have missed its colors, its beauty, its many faces, and its nuances. In effect, you will have missed the point.