The Future Is a Canvas - Part 3
Combine your principles, your decisions, and the uncontrollable to create a unique life.
Offscripting is my bi-weekly email of essays about the power of creativity to shape and change our lives.
If you no longer want my email, then gently press that unsubscribe button.
You can read the previously posted parts of this 3-part essay here and here.
In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.
Peter Drucker, the godfather of modern management (pulled from Greg Mckeown’s Essentialism)
Christie had never been an athlete, so it wasn’t surprising that the first paper airplane missed the map laid across the floor by several feet, eliciting laughter and boos from the spectators. She threw again and would keep throwing as long as it took.
The game was simple. Once Christie had landed planes on 3 candidate countries, her friends and family voted on which country my sister would travel to next—as you do at a Throw the Paper Airplane at a Map Party.1
Our dad had some frequent flyer miles set to expire and offered them to Christie. In turn, Christie, who had shuffled off her professional coil to freelance and travel for a spell, invited some friends over for food, drink, and the chance to determine her life’s course.
She landed planes in:
Indonesia
Chile
China.
If you’re thinking that this game is ridiculous to the point of being insanely stupid…
Well, you might be right. But bear with me.
One last time, this essay’s three-headed thesis:
1) A failure to cultivate creativity led me to land in a Guamanian jail cell;
2) The fundamentally creative act of getting sober transformed my life from the disaster it had become to an adventure I’m grateful for; and
3) My improved circumstances have grown out of embracing creativity as a way of life.
How the canvas of our futures gets filled in and filled up depends on innumerable factors, some within our control, many beyond. If your future is a canvas and you are the painter (as well as the painted), then what are the paints, the brushes, the brushstrokes, the techniques?
At the risk of torturing this metaphor to death, we paint the canvas using our principles and our choices. Our lives unfold as an endless interplay between principle and choice, each one constantly informing the other.
For me, embracing creativity as a way of life meant recognizing that I do have agency over my principles and (many of) my decisions. A more creative life began unfolding once I determined my principles, took ownership over the things I could control, accepted what I could not, and combined it all to form a life that by now is uniquely my own.
The blank canvas is a scary thing for the artist. A blank future is a downright frightening thing for a human being.
I began this essay quoting Peter Drucker because, for much of human history, the future maybe wasn’t so blank a canvas. If I were born in a village just about anywhere on Earth 1,000 years ago, my hunch is that my path forward is pretty clearly delineated. I am a member of my tribe. I am defined by the relationships I was born into, and not only will I not leave that tribe, but I can’t even fathom how big the planet is or how many different kinds of people are on it.
Pardon me for oversimplifying here, but that villager might be living a paint-by-numbers life like I described before, the life that landed me in the Guamanian jail. However, and obviously I can’t speak to the state of mind of any human being 1,000 years ago, I’m guessing those people had substantially less existential angst than we do now. They were concerned with survival, subsistence. They also understood themselves as individuals in the context of tribe.
I, on the other hand, am the spoiled and tribeless son of a wealthy post-industrial society. The paint-by-numbers life was, for me, not about focusing on survival but an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for my choices. I was terrified of getting the answer wrong, of screwing my life up. So at a fairly young age, I chose a template for a “successful life” and started jumping through the requisite hoops.
At the heart of that choice is the contrast between convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking is around pursuing “the right answer” in a linear way. Divergent thinking is about exploring and considering alternative possibilities, a more creative process that involves opening the mind and trying on different ideas. We employ both types of thinking regularly; one’s not inherently better than the other. They’re more like flip sides to the coin of how we approach decision-making.
My problem as a younger man, as Drucker points out above, was that I knew I had choices. I just wasn’t allowing myself to dream or consider options beyond a narrow range. I knew I was mailing it in on determining my future, outsourcing what might be the most essential role any of us plays—trying to make the juice of this life worth the squeeze.
Getting all the juice out of a creative life is hard, but getting a full cup from a template life is, for some of us, impossible.
My template life was a convergent one. For my 21-year-old self, all roads led to grad school (grad school for a JD, MA, or MFA?). Because grad school was the right answer, I left 99% of the possibilities unconsidered, including a number of ones that might have have led to my 20s going much more smoothly.
Which brings us back to my sister throwing paper airplanes at a map.
At first blush, Christie’s decision to let a combination of fate and her friends choose where she’d spend a month of her life might come across as irresponsible, even offensive. I’d argue that it was a beautiful example of embracing a creative life.
I don’t know what my sister’s guiding principles were at that time, but I do know she was learning about trying to worry less and trust the universe a little bit more. She wanted to push beyond her comfort zone and challenge herself (and her anxiety) by entering a new situation in a new place.
Her experiment worked.
We voted to send her to Chile in the fall of 2015. It was her first time in South America and first solo international trip beyond the cozy confines of western Europe.
The trip went well, most notably because Christie met Estevao, a sincere, warm Brazilian. They started talking in a cafe in Pucon, an outdoorsy little town resting in the shadow of a picturesque volcano at the the northernmost edge of Patagonia, one of the world’s wildest and most beautiful regions.
They kept talking, and Christie returned to Chile—friends and family in tow—in May 2018 to marry the guy. Three years on, they’re living in the United States and are about to welcome their first child.
Now, obviously I love that story because the seemingly crazy bet paid off, right? I’m 5 years into a marriage to a woman I met during 10 days of silence at a Buddhist retreat center in the Indian Himalayas. These stories alone are worth the cost of the trips.
But I don’t think my sister or I met our spouses BECAUSE she went to Chile or I went to India specifically. Instead, it’s more like we ended up in those places BECAUSE we had decided to open ourselves up to possibilities and take opportunities as they presented themselves.
I used to want to predict the future. Plot my life’s trajectory on a straight line and march confidently forward, collecting milestones and accolades in an orderly fashion. I now understand that life doesn’t work that way. I cannot predict the future and shouldn’t pretend I can. Pretending tends to bring out the worst in me, the sort of stuff that lands a guy in a Guamanian jail cell.
Thank you for reading. Offscripting is where I send out essays about creativity every other week. If you’d like them in your inbox and aren’t subscribed, remedy that.
There were a few caveats:
Christie got 1 veto.
United Airlines had to fly there.
We could not send her to a country with serious security concerns, such as civil war.