Navigating Randomness
Careers had trajectories, I thought, growing up. Somehow my father made it work, and the outlines were clear enough. After pursuing my own career, I realized what a survivor my father was, trading the early postwar idea of a career-for-life for one that anticipated the portfolio work that Charles Handy only labeled as such in his 1989 book, The Age of Unreason. (Unlike what Handy had in mind, my father’s “portfolio” was a succession of jobs.)
That same year, Mary Catherine Bateson published Composing a Life. Profiling five women, she showed how improvisation is a dominant feature of life. Her book complements Handy’s idea that life is a portfolio of activities, some handed to us and others consciously taken up. A portfolio is everything for which we’re responsible. It’s also a way of displaying what we’ve done. Composing a life takes this further. We act from agency.
Improvisation is a response to contingency, but it has a cybernetic aspect like sailing. To sail is to place oneself in a world that is contingent, yes, but also marked by patterns. Life teaches us by raw experience to what extent we can rely on them. Improvisation can be tacking toward a destination or abandoning it in preference for another. We don’t always have a choice.
If we’re lucky, we benefited from those who saw glimmers of promise in us. They’re part of our lineage, if we have one, a mix of nature and nurture. Keeping faith with them is helpful to our unfolding. We owe them a debt, which prompts us to fulfill their faith in us in some manner.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2001 Fooled by Randomness notes that the way we narrate our lives in retrospect is skewed by what he calls survivorship bias: we attribute success to our own efforts while downplaying luck. Because our lives are steeped in randomness, luck actually has an outsized role.
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Behind randomness is the bald fact of transience as life’s leitmotif. We have to live with it as our true condition, a paradox that pits our inner sense of continuity against our awareness of life’s finitude. The midlife crisis is an instance of the nihilism that can set in when apparent success feels hollow or pointless. The higher purposes that can save us from this arise from life itself. Many are the obligations we take on out of love for others. We work to support them, and this impulse can extend to our community.
Self-actualization, as Maslow called it, is another form such purposes take. If they start out as small acts we make despite ordinary life’s distractions, time can accrue them into something greater. This point was made by the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching. Robert Grudin wonderfully elaborated it in his 1982 book Time and the Art of Living, pointing to time as life’s crucial force, the wind in our sails as we pursue our larger purposes and passions. An idea of our destination is useful, lest we end up sailing in circles. (Cavafy’s Ithaka has the last word on destinations. Take pleasure in the journey, he suggests.)
Handy may have assumed that portfolio workers would just weed out the false starts and dead ends, but the sting of failure is a real thing in life. Part of our narrative-making is a tendency to elaborate the present as a glowing future to which we become emotionally attached. When it proves illusory, we suffer. Cultivating resilience demands a faith in life and our place in it, but we need to channel this faith into actions that prevent passivity and stasis. Bateson’s emphasis on “composing” and improvisation reflects this.
Buckminster Fuller’s life illustrates what Bateson had in mind. It was a series of apparent failures that added up to something brilliant and unexpected. It’s clear that both composition and improvisation figured, the one constantly revising the other in light of experience. To paraphrase an entry in E.M. Forster’s Commonplace Book, you need the self-confidence to push toward greatness, and the modesty to take stock constantly and recalibrate.
My father was a planner of D-Day in his late 20s. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, winning a Bronze Star for his bravery. I owe my existence to his survival. But sailing was his means of self-actualization. He built a class boat and later sailed a 30-foot Canadian sloop. When he finished building the class boat, he told me that he sensed his father’s approving presence.
His career had many reversals. A food chemist, he put Vitamin B-1 in rice across Southeast Asia when I was young, working out of Manila and then Singapore. Later on, he organized famine relief in Brazil and India, but he was sidelined by the Nixon administration. It wrecked the health of this man of action whose career had been based on getting things done.
“Every career is different,” he told me, when I once asked him for advice. It may have been his way of saying that each one is limited in its own way. It has its necessity, a career, and fuels higher purposes, but the particulars of one career or another blur together. When you look back, it’s not them you remember. Work colleagues slip away unless they genuinely were friends.
Compose your life, Bateson wrote. She saw it as the kind of serious play we first engage in as children. We owe our existence to it, in reality, so it must be intrinsic (and not uniquely human, as bower birds show us). Serious play means we’re absorbed in it, losing track of time as we pursue it. The irony is that the heart of self-actualization transcends the self. That’s why it’s not a steady state but one that ebbs and flows, yet gives our lives meaning or purpose, whether in the service of a passion or a calling.
