“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”
-Ben Okri
Such words and sentiments have become my hope and comfort over the last few years of my life. The confidence that there is indeed some guiding force that is not indifferent to our dreams; that the inarticulate hopes we find embedded in our hearts are not put there as a cruel joke or a meaningless taunt. I remember, both as a child and as a young man, conceiving of the kind of person I wanted to be, and what the life I would wish to live might look like. I recall with anguish the person I have been at times, and the bewildering turns taken along the way. I sometimes now see glimpses of the person I will end up becoming, and it is not so very far off from what I had hoped.
I read recently about the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. A maze has many possible outcomes, some of which are dead-ends. In a labyrinth, no matter how convoluted and complex the path, the walker always ends up at the appointed destination.
It is not that I would choose the way things went, or the route that I have come. But it is heartening to see the beginnings of a kind of over-arching order and meaning to life. One that has asserted itself despite both my resistance to, and my attempts at assisting it. Whatever my life may be in the end, it is comforting that it is not something I could not recognize as my own.
Of course I am not sure exactly what Kafka meant by "Wait". I suspect though it is something akin to my own long resisted lesson that sometimes, the real work of making art is inward; still, invisible, and maddeningly inactive. That sitting and looking - seeing until I understand - is the essence of art, more so than the drawing or cutting or shaping or writing. The hardest part of a good drawing, for me, is the discipline to look at a subject more than I look at my line; to wait, to see the truth of it, before I record it with a mark. Perhaps good art, like all living things, requires a gestation period after conception. A time when the seed must lie buried in the ground.
I wonder if our lives are like that too. That we are the art of some higher being, one who waits patiently to see us unfold organically, rather than calling us into existence fully formed. That we are the planting of a patient gardener, who does not forget what the seed he has buried looks like.
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