May 29, 2022
Goethe once said, “I find the great thing in this world is, not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.”
Whether you’re 22 or 50, “Where do I go from here?” is always a question worth asking. Your answer might involve two senses of direction. First, the way you’re already going. Are you getting better or worse, closer to your goals, more satisfied with your life? Second, the way you are managing your self—your time, your choices, your plans and goals.
Of course, you can’t change your direction in time, which is ineluctably from where you are now into the future. Unlike spatial location, you don’t have similar power over when you are in time. So at least as far as time is concerned, the question, “Where do you go from here?” is always into the future, whatever other answer you may have. So, barring your demise, next year will be here no matter what, and although you can’t change that, you can change your life and yourself. You can learn to play the piano or speak Mandarin, but only if you give new direction to your behavior such that will eventually arrive at that new skill set. So really the direction of your life is part of the answer to the question that perpetually annoys college students: “What are you going to do with your life?” More specifically, where do you want to be in 5, 10, or 15 years and what steps do you plan to take to get there?
If you consider your life and its direction, a number of crucial questions arise. Your life is proceeding daily, but where is it going? What is the good for which you live? Is that good the best thing for you? These aren’t abstract questions but the kind of issues that especially confront young persons in choosing their futures. What’s especially true when you’re young remains true for decades. In choosing the goals of your life, you choose yourself and the kind of person you will be. You contribute the essential plotlines to the story of you.
Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, has come to the conclusion that the distinguishing feature of our species is that we, unlike all other animals, contemplate our future. Seligman thinks that we humans are misnamed homo sapiens and that homo prospectus would be more accurate because we thrive on considering our prospects. He thinks as a species we are focused on the familiar message of graduation commencement speakers: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Part of this focus on the future is reflected in choosing goals towards which your steps can be aimed. Your actions—daily, weekly, annually—have a direction in so far as their cumulative effect is to move you toward or away from chosen goals.
Interestingly, you can have a clear goal without knowing how to get there when you begin the project of moving toward it. This is the lesson of Frodo Baggins and Lewis and Clarke, who had to resort to wayfinding since they only had vague, general directions to Mount Doom and the Pacific Ocean.
Like those adventurers, we are driven by hope, and hope is a future-directed emotion. Our loves and the hopes they engender give direction to our lives. The love for science, or nature, literature or music, for basketball or ice skating, for family or for God, define and determine a person’s life by directing her or his activities and commitments. The project of life largely consists in the pursuit of one’s loves, and that pursuit is directed by those loves.