A Thought on Getting Out of Your Own Way
"Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater."
-- Viktor Frankl
Life's many and complex moving parts work far more synergistically than we think. Much like an organism. But a discrete component of that organism may not necessarily see it the way a removed observer can.
A single red blood cell will find itself spontaneously thrown1 out of the recesses of a bone to be jumbled around by turbulent red and blue serum currents in a seemingly endless cycle of oxygen supply and demand, until one day simply disintegrating and having some of its constituents recycled to repeat the Sisyphean circuit, while others are excreted in feces and urine. A medical student will trace the very same process with fascination and awe, seeing it for what it's worth: the sustenance of life itself2.
The tragedy of the human condition lies in the tendency to be swept away by the former; the triumph in the ability to contemplate the latter.
My three year-old son began swimming lessons this summer. My wife was mildly and rightfully worried by his propensity to cling, avoid interaction with instructors, and refuse to jump in and swim; behaviour that the other kids were not displaying. While children easily parted from their parents, hugged and laughed with the lifeguards, and were impossible to remove from the water, our boy stood by his mother, silently observing the surrounding commotion.
I was less worried. I know our son is more introverted and cautious as an individual, much like I was when I was a child; I knew he simply needed his own time, and to work up to certain expectations on his own terms.
I also know that our famed paediatric milestones used to gauge our kin's development are deceitfully vulnerable to inaccurately rigid application by uneducated and opinionated onlookers. My parents' friends frequently expressed concerns around my apparent delay in speech development, but Mom and Dad did not heed their alarmism. They didn't even flinch when my kindergarten teacher called them to say she was worried that I didn't know certain words.
They instinctually knew there was nothing worrisome about my development.
Being raised by Polish immigrants in Canada meant growing up in a bilingual environment. While global speech delay in bilingual children is a myth that has been confidently debunked3, there is evidence showing that there can be discrepancies in lexical distribution: "As an example, if a Spanish/English bilingual toddler knows 50 Spanish words and 50 English words, she will probably not appear to be as good at communicating when compared to her monolingual cousin who knows 90 English words. However, assuming 10 of the toddler’s Spanish words are also known in English, then the toddler has a conceptual vocabulary of 90 words, which matches that of her cousin. Even so, knowing 50 vs. 90 English words could result in noticeably different communication abilities, but these differences are likely to become less noticeable with time."4
My kindergarten teacher was worried that I didn't know certain English words, but she also didn't know how many Polish ones I knew.
I am now fluent in five languages. My parents were right to ignore the false and noisy alarms.
I was also right to trust my son's developmental pace. He is now attempting dives with running starts and without assistive flotation devices. He's having full conversations with the lifeguards. And he seems to be trying to surpass Wim Hof in breath holding capacity. A child who was suspected to be "behind" surpassed them all in more ways than one.
The kids that had surpassed my son are now trying to catch up. Some of them will, but others won't because it isn't the direction they're supposed to follow.
Why do we expect development as unique as the individual's to be unequivocally universal?
We frantically congregate within the limited confines of those vascular walls and bombard fellow cells with unfounded expectations: "Why isn't she carrying oxygen the way we are?!" Infused with anxiety, parents start wondering the same and search for expertise to make sense of their offspring's wayward growth, all the while ignoring that their precious bundle is still a stem cell potentially destined for the greatness of a macrophage, engulfing and digesting anything that doesn't belong in the body, or of a thrombocyte, protecting the system from hemorrhage.
We quite literally miss the forest for the trees or, in this case, the human body for the individual cells.
I only assign blame, however, to those vague and nameless others to temporarily evade acknowledging my biggest critic: me. I never would have even considered forcing my son to swim; I trusted his process. But I strongarm myself into frigid waters and mercilessly ask why I'm not swimming like Michael Phelps. I paradoxically revel in my son's unique chronology but berate my own, comparing myself to the incomparable and pouring cognitive and emotional energy down the drain of anxious inactivity.
I love writing. I derive great satisfaction from looking at the colours within words and mixing them to paint images infused with myriad shades and hues. I encounter tremendous pleasure in taking the predictable, bland blocks that most concepts are and interlock them to see how many combinations I can find. But I've historically thwarted many efforts because I simply didn't write the way I thought other admired authors did. I needed broader time blocks to gather my thoughts and express them with minimal eloquence, but other authors only needed twenty minutes a day. I would need to review and revise to get it just right, while others promoted quantity over quality and shirked the quest for perfection. In brief, the writer in me needed some time to observe and understand while the foreign authoritarian in me kept trying to push me into the pool.
I felt guilty for taking longer; for revising and pondering more. That is, until I was able to gather more information through observation. The first occurrence was an interview with famed general surgeon and successful author, Dr. Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, MA. Being as busy and active as he is, I automatically assumed that he could write with lightning speed and, well, surgical precision, but while talking to Shane Parrish, he admitted that he could spend an entire day going over and over a single paragraph.
"Extended time blocks and a quest for perfection?" I thought to myself.
The second discovery came while reading Dr. William Deresiewicz's essay, Solitude and Leadership. In his 2009 address to the students of West Point Military Academy, he recounted, "I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day - half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness - for seven years. T.S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That's half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating."
I would never deny the merits of the prolific writers who could produce far greater quantities of high quality content than the aforementioned. But I'm starting to realize that I don't have to be like them in order to write. And even more importantly, the success of my surrounding contemporaries should not inspire self-inflicted pressure that tries to rush what can't be.
I don't know what type of cell my son's to become, but I'm excited to watch him grow into the man he is meant to be. Nor do I know what type of writer I'm growing into, but having reflected on my linguistic - as well as my son's athletic - development, I'm learning to allow it to happen by getting out of my own way: "Little wonder, then, that, made as we are and trained as we are to organize complexity, we are constantly trying to assign each and everything a name so that we can organize it and control it, so much so that it can be tempting to try to name and organize something that cannot be pressured or regulated, this elusive thing called the self."5
References:
1The notion of being thrown into existence was largely developed by Martin Heidegger. The concept of Geworfenheit, or "thrownness", is an existentialist one alluding to the perceived arbitrariness of being born into a specific family within a particular cultural context and historical period, all of which are completely beyond one's choosing.
2What from one perspective may appear to be random and without purpose may actually be infused with insurmountable meaning when observed from another angle. One of the 20th Century's largest proponents of meaning as the human heart's ultimate desire was Austrian psychiatrist and Jewish Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl: "Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."
3Byers-Heinlein, K., & Lew-Williams, C. (2013). Bilingualism in the Early Years: What the Science Says. LEARNing landscapes, 7(1), 95–112.
4Ibid.
5Whyte, D., The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship, Chapter 7: "Searching for a Self: The Pursuit That Is Not a Pursuit", Riverhead Books, New York 2009, 160. [Text made bold by author of this post for emphasis]