Go where the path may lead, but also know that there are infinite other paths that will get you there.

I was initiated into drama geekdom around age 8, when I was cast as The Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol. Dressed as a Christmas present (because my director was ironic like that), I, along with my compatriots, the ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Yet to Come helped our dear friend Ebenezer Scrooge understand how he had arrived where he was today, and where he was headed on his current path. At this critical intersection of past and future, it was up to him to change the present in order to save a life in the future.

While there exist several indicators to suggest A Christmas Carol to be complete fiction (supernatural creatures are a good place to start), there is one in particular that jumps out at me:

In real life, we don’t have the luxury of knowing how the future will pan out. 

 6 years ago, when "my fears, career-wise" were alleviated

We can semi-reliably understand how present actions will affect the immediate future, but it’s difficult to know how they might directly affect the long-term. This doesn't mean, however, that we should stop caring about the future at all. 

Last Friday, I attended Speakeasy SF, a hybrid bar and theater act set in the 1920’s Prohibition era (I’m surely breaking all rules of discretion by writing about it). The show took place in a little space hosting simultaneous scenes in each of its three rooms. Upon entering, my group sat down to watch the cabaret. After a few acts, it was decided at someone’s whim to move to another room. We walked through a gambling scene and halted at a bar long enough to witness a familial uproar. After, some audience members remained at the bar, while others of us moseyed into a dressing room in perfect time to witness the unfolding of a marriage, mistress and all. The scene was only done once, and those of who were there, at the right place at the right time, got to watch it. This was true of all the acts in all the rooms. You, as an audience member, experienced whatever you saw based on your arbitrary decisions to stay, stay a bit longer, or walk away.

Toward the end of the show, I returned to the cabaret where we had started our evening. The trio we witnessed in the dressing room scene barged in shortly after.

“Woah,” I thought, “It’s amazing how the story comes together.” Amazing – above and beyond your typical good book or television show – because it came together despite the arbitrary path I as an audience member chose during the show. The writers designed the show in such a way that all its audience members would achieve some sort of closure no matter the order in which they visited each spot and the time they spent there.

Maybe because we’re all hitting that self-declared “quarter-life crisis,” my friends and I are especially concerned about “what we’re doing with our lives.” Our phone calls and texts express admissions of feeling “lost,” “confused,” or “unhappy.” While I can’t speak for others, I should clarify that I am not necessarily questioning what I am doing with my life today. Thinking only about my day-to-day, I’m actually quite happy. My unsettling emotions, quite appropriately, are attached to the unknown future. I wonder if there is one right path and whether I am on it.

In a recent New York Times article, the author writes, “One of the hard things in life is learning to ask questions that you can actually answer.” He urges us to ask of ourselves questions that are concrete. For example, instead of asking ourselves what we are doing with our already unpredictable lives, we should ask ourselves if we are challenged and rewarded in our lives today. If we, today, are acting and working in ways that will help us achieve the goals that we believe in today. 

Obsessed with one path to take us to an unknown future, we will burrow down a rabbit hole that leads anywhere but forward. But if we realize that, for any tangible goal, we have the option to follow or forge one of many paths toward that same destination, we can get life to act more in our favor.

Friday evening, as I watched a number of story lines converge, I was pleasantly reminded how, for any given ending, we can rely on any number of relevant paths to get us there.

What are you doing with your life? Nobody, aside from your years Yet To Come can tell you that. But are you on a path? Are you on the right path for today? These are the questions we should be trying to answer. If all the world's a stage, we should be worrying about creating a sequence of well-written scenes. They'll tie themselves together by the end.