The Question always comes one of two ways. First, from the glass-half-full types, it’ll be something like: “Gee, that sounds so exciting. How do you do it?” From the other camp the phrasing is more along the lines of: “Are you out of your damn mind?” The answer to the first question is simple but I think comes off as kind of patronizing and smacks of marketeering. It is: “Well, you just do it.” The answer to the second is just a simple “Well, yes – probably.”

The questions, of course, usually center around my previously reported propensity to pack up, toss my life into a box, and go do something else. Those of you who have been hanging around for the past eleven months have been witness to my most recent relocation endeavor – that being the minor change from life afloat Back East to life as an urban Dirt Dweller in the oh-I-do-so-wanna-be-a-big-city of Seattle on our opposite bordering ocean. There have been others. I wanted to use this week’s post to offer some explanations, er, OK, maybeexcuses, no actually more like self-justifications, for this behavior to give you all a better idea of what actually transpires when I try to figure out “where do I go from here”.

Because I think it’s happening again.

First off, I must tell you that this tendency is nothing new. I can trace it back to at least my freshman year of college when – based on a less-than one-minute conversation about my carrying a guitar case – I fled my chosen field of study and became a geologist. There were several other incidents earlier than that as well going back to my earlier teens. My impetuous nature has sallied forth on numerous occasions since then often to my chagrin but always to the surprise of those around me. I’m sure a cursory evaluation by a trained professional would label me as “highly unstable” based on these behaviors they would be overlooking something much deeper. Every one of these alterations in the course of my life has been carefully planned.

Just not by me.

Now, don’t worry, I’m not going to go into some “higher power” rant about how God or somebody like Her is directing my life and that I really don’t have any control over (nor blame for) my actions. I’m not going to hop into some New-Age-Quantum-Justifiation logic-circle about how the Universe exists basically to take care of my frivolous wants and desires and all I have to do is ask politely. Nor am I going lapse into Aristotlean fatalism and deny any responsibility for my actions at all. No, the control comes from much deeper than that. The controlling agent is buried deep within my DNA, coded into my very being, and exercises all of its power by making me unable to answer one simple little question.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I am sure that any of you who have ever had a job interview recognize that question immediately. It’s the one they ask just before the end of the interview to see if you’ve done your homework on the company and can envisage yourself buried somewhere within the corporate bureaucracy toiling away for them in the distant future. The ask it to make sure you’ve got the commitment level to stick it out for five years to reach that goal. And they ask it to find out how fast you can think on your feet and come up with the bullshit answer that you think they want to hear.

My problem was that I’d answer the question honestly with something along the lines of: What, are you out of your damned mind? If I knew that I’d probably be off doing THAT instead of talking to you about this dead-end job.

“Thank you for coming in. The door’s just behind you.”

Needless to say I was able to come up with a stock answer that was both sufficiently obsequious, not obviously patronizing and obtuse enough to leave my future employers thinking that I may just have a future with the Company which, considering I find myself sitting at the kitchen table and typing this blog, I didn’t.

This seeming uncertainty about the future course of my life is merely the surface expression of the deep-seated certainty contained in my DNA that someday in the not-so-distant future I will be no longer extant and the hypothetical five-year plan question will be moot.

There is not a moment to lose.

The trigger for this bout of self-reflection was the book “At Home, A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson. In it Bill talks about how we’ve adapted to live the way we live and how, in fairly short order, we’ve changed from a Hobbesean life that is “nasty, brutish, and short” to what we’ve come to expect. The nasty part has been taken care of primarily by antibiotics. The brutish part was eliminated by the invention of the Lazy-Boy recliner. This leaves the fly in the ointment, life, even today, is way too short. Sure, life expectancy has been on the increase, but that’s mostly because not so many kids die now. Even with all our medical technology the adult life expectancy has not reliably exceeded our biblically allotted “three-score and ten” to “four score”in the roughly 6,015 years since the world was created.

For an exercise take the average life-expectancy for the country in which you live, seventy-six years for males in the U.S. and eighty-one for females, and subtract your age. Now think back to what you were doing that number of years ago. If your answer isn’t “I wasn’t born yet” then you are running out of time.

The fault in my DNA has allowed me, from a very early age, to access this feeling that there is not much time left. Or, maybe there’s plenty of time left but there are so many things left to do. Plus, I’ve got to consider that eventually I will probably want to slow down and take it easy in my declining years. Okay, maybe not, but you get the picture. Then I factor in that seventy-six years is the average. I could go longer than that or maybe there’s even less time than I think. Eeek!

The end result of all this is that these apparently random life-changes come off as somewhat impetuous or precipitous or, in a worst case, poorly thought through. In fact, they are none of these. What happens with me as I’m going along in the direction I think I should and I sense a tug in a completely different direction is that I just think WTF, and follow the tug. Because, really, what’s the worst thing that can happen?

The answer to that question is that the worst thing that can happen by going off and doing all these new things is exactly the same as the worst that can happen by doing nothing. Admittedly, I may not be able to live as comfortably as I might otherwise but then the whole concept of comfort in the way we mean it today is only a couple hundred years old. I may be less likely to die from an ill-timed bacterial infection but viral diseases have yet to be slain. Many other threats ranging from accidents to heart attack continue to threaten my very existence regardless of how I choose to live. Toss onto that pile earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, blizzards, pestilence and famine and you can see that regardless of how I live, the picture is pretty bleak.

Then there is the flip side. What’s the best thing that can happen? This is the great unanswerable because I can’t know this until after I’ve made the choice and lived my life from that point forward. I can’t go back and say “well that was a mistake” because I can never know if the other path would really have been better, or worse. My only choice is to make the decision and press on regardless. To live my life as best I can until the very end. It is at that end that I try and place myself when I feel the tug of possibility. I try and imagine lying there with the guy holding the scythe at my side, looking back at this choice and wondering if I would regret not making it. If that answer is yet then I know it’s the right decision and that is really the path I should be following.

It may turn out that following this new path was a bad move. But one thing I know is that I won’t regret making the choice I did when it’s all said and done. Bad things could happen. You never know going into these things. It could all work out wonderfully well or I could crash and burn, one time, ten times, a hundred times. It doesn’t matter because each and every time, right before I go down in flames, I will be flying.

There’s that tug again, I better go check it out. There is not a moment to lose.