I like to ask a lot of questions because I think most of us build our lives on what we’ve been handed, and this usually makes sense. Even though I’m trying to find encompassing answers, we can’t really start there, so we start with what we’re familiar with.
For example, most of us have lived long enough to see a large scaffolding beside a building which is under construction. The purpose of the scaffolding is to help people build a completely different structure, it’s not entirely useful in itself, but if the scaffolding is bad then building under construction suffers (along with anyone who tries to use the scaffolding).
I feel like most of us are born on a scaffolding, handed a hammer, and told to get to work, and if you want to do anything different, you really have a fight ahead of you, because questions about the scaffolding you were born on, let alone the building you’re constructing, threaten the purpose of everyone else there who got to work without questioning it.
But there’s even folly in that kind of openness, because do you think you’ll find answers on a “better” piece of scaffolding? You might find some things that work better than before, but to say that your new set-up is comprehensively “better” than before would be hilarious, even if it was true.
And let’s say that you leave the construction industry entirely and decide to be an artist or even someone who writes books (or blogs, haha) about how you’re actually willing to ask questions while everyone else shuts their ears and keeps working for fear of having their life’s purpose invalidated. What end are you really working toward? Some sort of “arrival” or “certainty”?
It’s possible my angst connected to this issue is my own pursuit of an “arrival” that doesn’t exist in this lifetime, but still trying to find it anyway.
And so that whole thought process is what’s led me to my life now, where I really do appreciate the “scaffolding” I was born on, and I really have picked up a hammer and have started working, and I see all these things that I think could be better within the zone of my life, and I do find purpose in trying to improve those things for others and also for myself, but now things have become more complicated, because it’s not just myself I’m making decisions for, it’s my family, and not just my immediate family, but also extended and future family, and so I feel pressure to be cautious because of the years of precedent laid before.
While it would be disappointing to get to the end of life and know that I never did the “dream” that looking back I felt like I could have done, what would be even more disappointing is to go for the “dream” that I thought would bring fulfillment, when in reality I just needed to learn to live where I already lived, on my own piece of scaffolding, working on the same building the last few generations were working on.
I use the example of construction, scaffolding, and a building, because they’re tangible, but in reality, things don’t feel quite so tangible in the moment, but I feel like they are anyway even though I don’t experience it like that every day.
And so I do feel like I can have a sort of reckless trust that I’m doing alright, but I also feel a bit of a pull in every direction, because if feels like I can’t keep up, and in the ways that I do have conviction I don’t have a way of actually making anything happen. What a life - always a question and where are the answers?
The worst thing would be to feel like I got an answer only to find out that I was building on sand all along. Because anyone can work to “feel” like they have an answer, and I think that’s what most of us do. We look for the most tangible things - money, house, car, power, influence, yadayadayada, and woop-de-doo we “feel” like that’s important, but is it really? I mean I’m sure it can feel like it is. You can feel like you’re better than a couch-potato, and a “hard worker”… but what if that’s just your version of running, and the couch-potato has their own version of running? I mean yes they have different trickle-down results for other people, but my contention is that both of those lives can have a very similar impact on the soul, and that one is definitely not better than the other for the individual experiencing it (even though one has a higher impact for others. Scale does not mean better or worse).
And so with all of that said, I take a sort of virtue-ethics approach to this, because maybe it’s not necessarily about the explicit thing that you do that has the most impact, but rather what kind of impact the explicit thing you do has on you that’s more real and worth focusing on.
I feel like this thought creates an open question where I appreciate what I’ve been given, and can count it as a gift, and can still shoot to do some “great” things, but also knowing that the greatest thing you can do is just to agree with where you’ve been placed, knowing that the greatest things probably won’t be what impresses other people on your resume, but the tension you hold in patience, with an understanding that other people down the line will reap the rewards.
