What Do You Want to Do with Your Life?

It's a misleading question, really, something you've heard from the moment you sat down to Career Day in elementary school (all the fathers and mothers patiently explaining that mysterious adult world to wide-eyed students - we thought it was fascinating once, before we understood the truth) to the time you step into the "real world," suit and tie buttoned up like a well-dressed monkey at the organ grinder (and I use that last word with all its accompanying connotations). Repeated again and again, interrogated, picked apart, spelled out in Lego pieces of little firemen and police officers tramping off to work. Their place in life. What they do. That unfathomable something from 9 to 5.

Well, that something slowly crystallizes, and the rose-tinted glasses fall from your eyes...and you realize, in fact, the question was never completely true (the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...if only we had lawyers back then), at least, as it was posed so innocently when you first sat down during circle time to share The Rest of Your Life (tm) as you knew it from the sandbox that delineated your entire world back then. Perhaps I might have been inclined to protest if I knew the truth, but looking back, I can't fault the adults for their deception. After all, "What do you want to do with your life?" seemed a perfectly transparent question from their point of view. The view that knew all the caveats which defined "what" and "do" and "want" and "your life," that is.

So perhaps it's time to rephrase the question. Perhaps it's time to let Gorgias take the stand. (You'll forgive me for the poor imitation, but we all have our shortcomings.) "What do you want to do with your life?" becomes, in so many words, "What makes you a worthwhile member of this society?"

...And that's the truth. Simple, right? For those of you already in the work world or otherwise trundling your way happily towards it (as the yellow Lego police man does each day, never shedding his organ grinder suit), it seems second nature. Not even worthy of mention. Of course I am a member of this society, and of course I must do this thing that makes me worthy of belonging. How else could we interpret the question? There are reasons the hand that feeds becomes the Stockholm syndrome that defines the rest of your life, ad nauseum.

But back then, do you think we as children would understand...I mean really, really understand...the ramifications of such a statement? Do you think that we would realize - and accept - the way our future goals were written for us? And even then, when all is said and done, could we ever imagine agreeing to it for...the rest...of our lives? The child who wants to be his hero so stylized cannot comprehend where poetic license ends and humdrum life, mundanity, that accursed repetition begins (for I am convinced Hell is repetition, merely entrapment in a plane one dimension short of what we were meant to live in). And what is this, this "rest" of your life? This "passion" they say you must find and then cling to like a jealous lover bent on squeezing every last drop from your heart's deliverance? (I imagine that domestic abuse awareness month ribbon staring ominously at me from the tabletop could say something to its powers). Even if it were possible to give so much of myself, I would not do it. A love of that sort, no matter how precious, demands something from you that you can never reclaim, and leaves something with you that you can never attain. It is the irony of specialization. Narrow alleyways once visited. Each cog, no matter how finely grained, can never become a perfect circle.

Ah, so then, let us return to the question as it was meant to be asked. As we believed it to be, naive and trusting, back when our worst fears lay in the pages of an R.L. Stine book.

What do you want to do with your life?

I'll tell you now. And if you ask me again, I'll tell you something different. Don't try to find convergence, because the question has no answer, it by its very nature cannot be answered, for who is to say that one of an infinite sphere of possibilities should be chosen out of the universes we cohabit? The very arrogance of that assumption pales my (admittedly deliberate) appropriation of Greek philosophy's mouthpiece. I can only tell you this moment, all the moments that I desire to experience, and ask for no more.

I want to sit beneath a willow tree painting the African cliffs at sunset.

I want to ride the wisps of song through an untouched glade.

I want to step off the edge of Babel with the sun in my eyes.

I want every climax that froze, for just a second, time in its tracks and laid bare the lucidity which led Sisyphus to smile as he descended the mountaintop.

Life is simulated annealing. So says the e-mail signature of a professor of mine. Well, if that is what living was meant to be, then God help me...but all of us deserve more than just an algorithm to abide our existences by.