Brain Food #854: The best way to get there
Challenging norms and optimal traffic routes
Thoughts of the day
Since applications like Google Maps launched, determined to find travellers the ‘best’ route for their destination, congestion on otherwise tranquil routes has increased. Other studies suggest that the crowdsourcing aspect of the apps results in “mass thinking,” leading drivers to the same quiet roads until they are no longer quiet. When the best route becomes the one everyone is trying to take, it may no longer be the fastest or the most convenient.
This is not an attempt to simplify or demean the sophistication and usefulness of navigation apps; it is to draw a parallel to imagining the trajectory of one’s life. Our tendency to think in absolutes can become counterproductive, standing in the way of growth and achievement. The absolute is an obstacle, a form of confirmation bias, of talking oneself out of things.
The same applies to thinking in absolutes for ‘the way’ in which any project should come to fruition—for example, assuming something should be ready to see the light of day only after countless drafts and revisions, or only after it reaches a specific, and often undefined, form of perfection.
On writing his autobiographical novel series My Struggle, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard said:
“I learned to lower the threshold; to accept whatever comes; to continue and not to throw away anything; and to do it every day. […] The key is not to think about the writing as good or bad, but to follow your fascination. That is hard, because there’s so much pressure to think of quality and self-presentation; to not appear stupid, or whatever. But the writing itself is easy.”
Echoing Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote “There are no rules, except those each individual makes up,” this is the kind of writing advice that may apply to how a life should be.
There is no single right way or single right path. Though some paths may be more objectively wrong, even those are not necessarily one-directional. They might also diverge and lead to somewhere unexpected. In seeking the ideal route, we forfeit the rest, forgetting that in life we craft the road as we go along, that there isn’t just one way to lead a good life. Sometimes, the best way to get somewhere may simply be to start.
Sometimes we may need to borrow someone else’s eyes to see the good that is in front of us. As Stephen King reflected while looking back on writing Carrie:
“I’d change a lot. It would have a little more depth when it came to the characters. Remember, it started as a short story. I had this idea about a girl with paranormal powers who was going to get revenge on the girls who made fun of her. It was too long for the markets that I had in mind, and I didn’t know very much about girls anyway, particularly girls’ gym classes and locker rooms, so I threw the story away. My wife fished it out of the trash, uncrumpled the pages, looked at it and said, “This is pretty good. I’ll help you.”
There is a scene in American Beauty where Allison Janney’s character says to her visiting son’s girlfriend, “Oh my, I apologise for the way things look around here.” The girl looks at the room, puzzled. The house itself looks pristine, almost unlived-in. When trying to fit an imaginary form of the ideal, possibly one that only exists in our minds, we may forget to live at all.
