I’m an exemplar at very little. I’m not qualified nor feted, rich nor famous. Indeed, probably the only thing I do better than the norm is choosing life paths that fall very much outside of the norm. While the truth is probably that I have a lack of stickability and an aversion to doing what I’m told, a more charitable assessment would be that I’m more comfortable than most at following my nose into interesting areas and, in doing so, taking risks.
At my age and stage there is no point bemoaning “what ifs.” I do have to admit, however, that I often contemplate what my life might have been in the event that I had actually applied myself at school, listened to wise counsel from those around me, knuckled down and just did what was expected of me and generally played my role in society. Notwithstanding that contemplation, at 50-something I fear I’ve left my run too late. I have, as they say, made my bed and now I must sleep in it.
While it is undoubtedly a little bit introspective and I run the risk of taking a flight of fancy that borders on self-obsession, I am drawn to the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken. In particular these lines:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Suffice it to say, while the road I’ve taken may not be the traditional one, it’s the one I’m on and in this life there is, alas, no reverse gear.
I was reflecting on the Frost poem and, in a departure from my usual Modus Operandi of wistfully thinking “what if,” I cogitated on the benefits of this path. Recently I arrived early for a board meeting. With time to spare, I caught up with a few colleagues who also had a predilection for punctuality. In the ten minutes or so that we had up our sleeves, we chose not to talk about the meeting to come (we’d all done our reading and cogitating upon the issues and all that was needed was the in-depth discussion with the entire board). Instead, we talked about a pretty wide range of subjects including:
- The political climate, obviously
- Travelling in Eastern Europe, in particular the WWII impacts on Poland and my parents travails during the Holocaust
- Historical fiction writers, in particular Leon Uris and James A Michener
- My love of the Bronte writings and my prized collection of a full set of Bronte works printed in 1893
- Nitrate levels in Canterbury groundwater
- Charles Babbage, the first person to invent the concept of a computer
- His son, Benjamin Babbage who investigated the Haworth water supply in Yorkshire in the mid 19th Century
A quick caveat: I’m a white, middle-aged male who grew up in a stable Western democracy. While I did little to actually leverage the advantages that I was born in to, it is only right to acknowledge my privileged position. Others are less fortunate and don’t have the luxuries that I have been given (and generally squandered). As such, it is a privilege to be in a position to have time to talk about these things. In addition, being asked to serve on boards is in itself a huge privilege.
With those acknowledgements out of the way I can’t help but rejoice at the opportunity to have such wide-ranging conversations with interesting, thoughtful and well read individuals. Perhaps middle age sees me display a tendency to be maudlin, but life is so short and our deeds so inconsequential in the scale of things.
I’m reminded of a visit I made many years ago to Megiddo, the biblical site in Israel that many believe will be where Armageddon begins from. Looking down at the site, I saw a deep ditch that some archeologists of a brutalist bent made back in the 50’s. Along that trench there were perhaps ten thousand years of history. Literally hundreds of generations of individuals all of whom are forgotten in the mists of time. People who lived and loved, learned and longed. While their deeds may be lost in time, I hope they lived lives full of thinking and discovery.
In 100 years little or nothing of what we do will be remembered. We shouldn’t have the arrogance to think that we matter. In that defeatist and fatalistic perspective on life, the best we can do is to live our lives to the fullest. As Henry Thoreau said, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
Here’s to interesting conversations. To sucking marrow. And to taking the road less travelled.
