The Choices We Make, The People We Become
This is the one about how we choose to live and the decisions we make about how to be alive in the world. Life happens to us every day; we can go along with it and see where we end up, or we can move out of default mode and steer.
Staying awake in your life gets harder as you grow older. You have travelled long enough to know both the highways and the backstreets, and your vintage is hard-won. You have gathered a life that now lies sprawled in eclectic patchwork across your passenger seat, your backseat and your boot. There are odd squeaks here, bumps and scratches there, but you know what they are, where they came from, and what they mean. The radio may be old, but you know instinctively how to angle the dial to listen to that full-throated Christian alternative rock that ferries you to your favourite window perch in heaven. You have earned the right to drift on the wheels of habit, experience, and success.
The question is: do you want to?
I recently re-read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library for my book club.
For those who haven’t:
Nora Seed, the central character, hates her life, so she takes steps to end it. Only, instead of dying, she finds herself in the titular Midnight Library, a place where her infinite possible lives are indexed and she can indulge her curiosity about how her life would have turned out if she had taken any number of different paths. A cornucopia of junctions leading down a seemingly infinite number of roads not taken.
So begins a series of journeys into her other possible lives, which, however intriguing, always end up disappointing her. Because such is life: whatever Haigian library life you choose, whichever Frostian road you take, you end up right there with you.
As it happens, I stand at a fork in the road myself and have recently determined to take the path decidedly more risky. Out of habit, maybe, but also because I want to keep my hands on the steering wheel. My beloved, family and friends alike, will tell you that this is neither new nor surprising. What once would have caused a storm at the announcing now barely ripples the surface. Just me being me. I have made the unconventional choice before, and despite everyone holding their collective breath, I have been okay. Better than okay. It has become not so much what I set out to do as what I end up doing. My “way leads on to way.”
Yet, even for me, packing up an established life to begin again in a new place in this latter season is dialing things up a considerable notch. It’s not so much that I’m nervous as that I suspect that I ought to be nervous. So I vacillate between cautious anticipation and mild apprehension, churning the possibilities and pitfalls over in my head, occasionally wondering whether I have bitten off more than I can chew, reminding myself that big bites just take longer to chew.
As Blix said to Maddie: whatever happens, love that.
I’m going to do this, and whatever happens, I am going to love it.
I want the mindfulness that comes with being in an unfamiliar place. Mongoose on its hind legs, neck craned, intently surveying the savannah, reading the landscape at the tip of its nose. That feeling. Everything is new; nothing is familiar. You have to pay attention. You cannot take things for granted. It makes you more alive, moves you out of autopilot and into gear. I have a theory that this is why God called Abraham away rather than blessed him in place. To a life unfolding one step at a time, keenly watching and listening for the cue to turn from the Lord of the Dance. “It’s you and me, Abe.”
Learning. Growing. Creating. Writing. Pushing boundaries. Wrestling with ideas. Solving seemingly intractable problems. These are the nutrients that nourish my soul. This is the cluster of stars in the universe by which I calibrate my compass.
Always unto God.
I harken back to the words of Thoreau: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
This is the hope. This is the prayer.
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig traces the futility of the torture we put ourselves through over all the other choices we could have made and all the other people we could have been. But the value of yesterday lies in the school fees it paid for today. Today is the beginning; today is what matters.
The only way to live our lives is present and forward. If our eyes are forever cast sideways or backward, it can breed a kind of madness.
For the present is the point at which time touches eternity, says C. S. Lewis.
Mrs Elm says to Nora Seed, “the only way to learn is to live.” Which, absolutely true.
But conversely, the best way to live is to learn. To be an eager, voracious learner. To observe attentively. To read widely and closely. To set up hypotheses at every turn. To gather data wherever you can, however you can. To be curious. To ask all the questions. To listen keenly.
I want to live my life making the big decisions thoughtfully and consciously, letting the small ones squeeze into the spaces in between. These days, when I worry that I won’t know the decisions I’m making are the big ones until long after I’ve made them, I call up Arthur Brooks’ Big Four Framework (descriptor mine, framework his) as standard and measure: faith, family, friendship, and meaningful work. Those are the big pieces I want to keep my eyes on.
To be here is to be grateful. Grateful for what I have learned on the journey to here, and grateful for the opportunity to set out on a new adventure at the intersection where my faith meets my desire to do meaningful work in the world.
I am determined to guard my sense of wonder, and to live fully while being alive.
Let’s do that, shall we?
Join me on an adventure to I Don’t Know Where. We’re going to love it there.