Twists and Turns

Pretty drained today, so I thought it would good time to post up this video link, which will do most of the work for me.

14 mins & 33 seconds of good old fashioned wisdom - not knowledge, not answers, not solutions, but wisdom about life.

Shortly after I resigned from my job, I felt as open about what I could do with my life as I did when I was twelve years old, maybe more so as the world has changed tremendously since then. There are more jobs, and more routes into them, and the world is more flexible. These days, if you have drive and a market, you could even create your own job.

We certainly live in wonderful times, but this isn't as great a predicament as it sounds. The choice is actually very overwhelming, and the freedom & opportunities we have bring with them a responsibility to make the right decisions, because now if we end up unhappy, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves...and wouldn't that be terrible?

I told a friend this, and he sent me this video.

Here's the problem with that attitude: freedom and opportunity don't make us any better at predicting the future. We simply can't know whether or not our decisions will be the right ones. As Steve says, "You can't connect the dots looking forward".

The story of the calligraphy course is the one that speaks to me the most. We make decisions without knowing their outcomes, and with some of them an outcome isn't revealed for a very long time. I sometimes find this quite difficult to deal with, especially when other people continually question my choices (often out of love or concern) and I don't yet have an answer for them.

Here's an example: I took a TEFL course a few years ago and gained a certification that I haven't used at all. It was just what I wanted to do at the time. I found it interesting and I have retained the knowledge & experience it gave me...everything from knowing where to look up grammatical rules to the day to day problems faced by my refugee students.

Maybe I will find a use for it. Time will tell. The point is, these little escapades are not necessarily a waste of our time and resources. They become part of who we are, and what we have to offer, and by undertaking them we develop something; maybe a skill, knowledge, or confidence - something that we can call on if a need arises. In this way, Steve's seemingly random calligraphy course probably changed the world.

We make decisions with the best tools we have at our disposal: instinct, reasoning, emotion. We celebrate the good ones, learn from the bad ones, and then there are the ones that are yet to reveal themselves as having any point at all - the detours of our lives.

But I don't think they are detours. They are the twists and turns in the road. The hardest decisions to make sense of. They might be surprising, confusing, or even exasperating, and we don't know where the hell they are taking us, but they are still a valid part of the journey.