Issue #77: Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans

Or, how Seth Godin's queue analogy gave me an existential crisis.

When I’m feeling lost, I take comfort in listening to Desert Island Discs. It’s reassuring to hear someone else’s life story: a collection of everyday, often-relatable rites of passage, experiences and emotions, brought together in a consistent narrative thread. The fact that these guests are famous, or highly-successful in their fields, or both, is an extra balm. You can fail, you can quit, you can take a risk, and you might still find yourself sitting in the booth opposite Lauren Laverne. 

And yet, narrating one’s life trajectory is a strange old exercise, whether or not you’re doing it for millions of BBC Radio 4 listeners. It feels necessary, almost, to tell it as if it were all part of a masterplan. Of marrying later in life, we might say I held out to meet The One. Of a career change, I just knew I couldn’t do that job forever. Of having children early, I got raising kids out the way so I could have fun in middle age. Of leaving (or moving to) a major city, I just didn’t fit into that way of life. 

It’s a humbling thing to admit the opposite: that you had little say in the matter, and you probably have limited say in where your life will go from here, too. At my weekly creative writing workshops, it’s a criticism sometimes levied at class members’ characters: that they are too passive, that life just happens to them. I can’t imagine a Desert Island Discs episode, recounted in a similar manner, would be very compelling, either. 

In reality, so much of the plot line of life happens as a result of some weird accident. A night out in a new neighbourhood. A redundancy. A pandemic. Unplanned occurrences that lead to your most defining moments. And sure, they’re easy to tell a story about in retrospect. But, more often than not, you didn’t really plan any of it. That’s not to mention the stuff that was really out of your control; your childhood, your genetics, your inability to digest lactose. 

It’s something I’m trying to get to grips with, this limited agency. How to wake up in the morning with a go-getter attitude and seize the day by its gonads, while simultaneously holding your hands up and declaring, que será será?