Embracing The Unavoidable
One day, a wealthy gentleman sent his personal assistant to get a latte from Starbucks and she came back trembling. In a rush, she had accidentally bumped into someone and when she looked up, Death was standing right in front of her, adorned with black hood and all. She was terrified and so asked her boss if she could borrow his car and drive out to his summer home in the Hamptons, in the hope of evading Death. He agreed and she set out immediately. Running some errands later that day, the man saw Death and asked, “Why did you frighten my assistant earlier?” Death responded, “I didn’t mean to. I was only shocked to see her; I have an appointment with her tonight in the Hamptons.”
This old and frightening parable is a pretty dark way to begin an essay about opportunity but I don’t think you can really discuss how opportunity works without also discussing fate. Upon reading interviews of very successful people, you’ll often find a theme recurring in their life stories: the overwhelming good fortune of having found success in their field because [fill in the blank] was all they were ever good at. Like our personal assistant's dealings with Death, their appointment with success in [fill in the blank] was unavoidable. This may be painful to think about for a reader who has, for their whole life, hard-headedly pursued the same career, to little avail. And as someone who’s been guilty of such resentment, I can say that I also find it nauseating how star athletes and musical virtuosos have a tendency to produce little star athlete and musical virtuoso children. If the parents were great writers, the child will be more likely to have an above average vocabulary and if the parents were great scientists, the chances are good that the kid won't be flunking science class. This is no coincidence and it can't exactly be chalked up to how someone is raised because studies of twins separated at birth and raised apart have found that they are far more likely to end up in the exact same careers. So in some sense, we are born prisoners to our innate abilities, interests and also shortcomings which, try as we may, we cannot escape from.
Is this just a little bit depressing and fatalistic? Yes. But I think that it’s an interesting paradox that opportunity might be a byproduct of embracing this imprisonment. Or to put it more positively, the better you know yourself, the more and better opportunities you might have.
Often, all it takes for a great opportunity to strike is the shedding of old skin, realizing that what you’re doing doesn’t fit you and being willing to let go of it. In my own case, the best decision I ever made was also the hastiest. At the time, I was living with a lady friend in Colorado and had a very comfortable life teaching music lessons and playing gigs. But after a two week trip by myself to New York, I realized that there was a side of me that I’d been suppressing and that I wasn’t as happy as I’d previously thought. It just so happens that upon my return I got an email from a friend who was moving to NY looking for a roommate. So I broke up with my girlfriend, quit my teaching jobs, quit the bands I was playing in, sold most of my stuff and hit the road. It was rash, illogical and risky but in spite of some hard times which resulted, I haven’t once regretted doing it.
We all know that opportunity can result from ballsy moves like this, but it can just as easily come from an unintended fuck-up and I think that these are the opportunities that tend to get missed most often. Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk was famous for writing catchy, tricky tunes with odd chromatic melodies and misleading rhythms. This, along with a penchant for trying to throw off improvisers with an eccentric style of accompaniment, became the bane of many a horn player’s existence. If a band member messed up one of Monk’s melodies, he would sometimes make them repeat that exact mistake on all subsequent performances. This may have seemed to the horn player to be insult added upon injury but it gave Monk’s music a quirky character unlike that of anyone else before or since. More importantly it proves that mistakes are only bad if you decide that they’re bad. By saying, “I meant to do that” even when you didn’t, you may find that a mistake can open up a new door you hadn’t seen before.
This should be a big relief to all given our earlier discussion of fate. While it remains brutally unfair that some people are born destined to be virtuosos in various fields, this doesn’t preclude those of us who are less perfect from having just as many opportunities and achieving an equally satisfying destiny. It’s really just a matter of knowing your strengths, acknowledging your quirks and having the courage to reject compromise on both those points.
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"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
~ Leonard Cohen