I can often be a very linear guy.
(Yes, I can hear those of you who know me well laughing loudly at the understatement in that sentence.)
I blame it on the fact that I listened too well as a child. I internalized the messages that there was a line or a path (a straight and narrow one) and it was best to stay on that path. Straying from it would be foolish, because… well, because it’s The Path and because They said so.
Other messages included the notion that grownups were smarter and wiser because they were further along the path. This implied that the more I learned and followed the rules, the more quickly I’d progress along the path too.
And as if all of that weren’t enough, my Catholic family came with the added pressure that falling off the path could mean eternal fiery damnation. Oh, and even if I stayed on the straight and narrow, there was a Judgement Day waiting at the end. Talk about everything going on your permanent record!
So it’s not much of a surprise that I paid a lot of attention to the path and wanted to learn all the rules so that I could ace the final exam of life.
Of course, as I got older, I started to notice that so many adults seemed to be from the “do as I say, not as I do” school of path-following. And I noticed that plenty of people who were supposedly on the path seemed to have challenges with it. Eventually, somewhere in my early teens, I arrived at a point where I decided that the path wasn’t really helping me much and perhaps it was at best a superstition passed down from generation to generation; and at worst something designed to simply keep people under control.
But boy-oh-boy there’s a lot of path-following, line-walking muscle memory baked into me. Of course there is - after all, eternal life was on the line!
Fast forward to today.
I haven’t really spent much of my adult life concerned about there being a specific path. But the idea of staying in line / toeing the line and the “universal truth” of the linear nature of time is still pretty strongly engrained.
Imagine a line stretching out in front of you, arrow straight and extending off to the vanishing point. When I was a kid, that’s how I imagined life. It didn’t take long for me to realize that no one’s line is a single straight path stretching out ahead. There are so many forks and branches of decision points (Robert Frost taught me that early on) and there are twists and turns, ups and downs and the occasional roadblock.
When I was given my “expiry date” at the age of 18, it was as though the mental line stretching out ahead of me suddenly got incredibly shorter. In fact, there was more line behind me than ahead of me and there didn’t seem to be any forks or branches to change that fact.
In time, it dawned on me: no one’s line actually goes off to the vanishing point! We all have a hard stop built into our lines - it’s just that we’re looking ahead into fog and can’t see where the end is. I’d been seeing my diagnosis as a death sentence, but suddenly realized it was actually a powerful fog light that allowed me to see the end. I’d been let in on the great secret of life! And I was going to share it with everyone I could, so they could make the best of their time.
Of course, if I was going to embark on such an epic mission, I had to “do it properly”. I didn’t have a lot of time and I wanted to help as many people as possible, so I defaulted back to my linear thinking. I knew I was going to speak to people. So I sought the input of other speakers who were further along the speaking line. Then I wanted to write a book, so I sought the input of speakers who’d written books…. you get the idea.
For me, the concept of following the line manifests itself as the voice of my father, saying something I heard a million times: “There’s two ways to do things - the easy way and the hard way.” Of course, following the line represented the easy way, which is why I’ve always stayed close to my linear, logical, left-brained approach to life.
But you know what? There’s a third way. The fun way!
Sometimes, I get tired of walking the line. I want to just… cut loose. Footloose. Kick off my socks and shoes. (YES, now that’s stuck in your head! 🕺🎶)
Life isn’t a video game where you run along collecting coins.
At the end, no one is going to care how many “likes” or “views” you have or whether or not you went viral
Life isn;t a competition to be won.
I’m not going to tell you what life is. Each and every one of you needs to decide for yourself what your life is about, but I can guarantee you this - it will be better if you crank up the music and dance from time to time!
I love the post. It is so you.