CRUISE CONTROL
Are you sure you need a purpose?
What was your thing in high school? Mine was trombone. My wife’s was tennis. My four kids’ were ballet, sports, choir, and ceramics. I also specialized in weed and literature, but I was distinctively a trombonist. I put in the hours to retain first chair and get the occasional solo, played in the marching band, the orchestra, the jazz band, the pit band, the pep band, ad hoc combos, and outside of school in a professional society band.
By specializing in a “thing” in high school, we all were practicing being adults. Nobody mentioned this. But once we were launched from school, life narrowed us into one or two specialties, which we were required to master the same way we put in the hours for ballet, sports, choir, or ceramics. I call these adult “things” masteries.
Each of us has their masteries. They are either vocations – our social role – or avocations – our private delights. My long-term masteries are writing, facilitating discussion, and coaching. One way or another, they’re how I’ve made a living for forty-plus years. They’re my groove through the demands of the species. Other people might have mastered driving trucks, mugging strangers, organizing food pantries, or landscaping rich people’s yards. In their mastery, the truck driver is accomplished at not getting into accidents, the mugger at not getting caught, the organizer at building something out of nothing, the landscaper at knowing soils. Each of them has an esoteric knowledge, and years of repetitive experiences that have adapted them to difficult situations and challenges. A mastery is an expertise.
Because we learned about masteries at a time we were forming our identities, we believed that our “thing” was a central identity. If we psychically connect a mastery to our sense of self, then it’s something of a burden. As long as we are special at our thing, we are special as a person. The better we are at the thing, the more special.
But what if that’s all wrong, an artifact or mistake of adolescence? What if your mastery isn’t there to define you or show you off, but a kind of cruise control machine that only starts humming when you take your foot off the accelerator and relax into the scenery speeding by.
The first few years of tromboning were a steady rise. Like all masteries, you start at the beginning, which in music is grasping whole notes. Trombones are well-suited for whole notes, which favor bass tones and resonance. You can blat them or play them sonorously. But whole notes are there to suck you in; nothing to come is as easy. Advancement on a brass instrument mostly requires gaining speed and reaching the more difficult high notes. For six years I worked on increasing my dexterity and my range. Along with them came higher status, at least in the music room. But before I might have, I hit my limits. The range I could blame on braces, which cut into my lips the higher I went. All three years of high school I wore braces. The dexterity? It never quite came. My tromboning ended in high school. At some point, I realized, I would need to find an adequate fallback, a new “thing.”
The way I see it, each of us is assigned a role that serves the interests of the species. Kierkegaard said, “Every human being comes to earth with sealed orders.” Whether my lot was thrown at birth or at 17, by God or a random trickster, as a leader or a follower – none of that seems material, or even knowable. I yam what I yam. I have my thing. You have yours. It’s rank hubris to claim I picked it.
We’re trained to believe that some lives are better than others, some masteries more important, some lots more lucky, some jobs more purposeful. Which might make sense in an animal pack with its alphas and betas and weebies and general sortings-out. But what happens when you expand your view to the species – all eight billion of us? As presidents and dictators are reduced to role players, the alphas seem to be humbled – there are too many to count for much – and the betas are drawn up into equal status.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely Players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts …
What are your roles? Are they important or trivial, influential or nondescript, showy or ignominious?
I don’t expect you to believe what’s coming next, but see if you can drop your skepticism for a few seconds and believe that it might be true in some alternate universe.
In acting out my role on the stage, I can notice that it occupies exactly the same space as Joe Biden’s or Charlie Manson’s, as my next-door neighbor’s or a third-generation denizen of a refugee camp across the globe. My influence is quite local – in any one week mainly on a few dozen people I cross paths with regularly and intimately – but expands out in concentric circles of contact to eventually meet all eight billion humans. See how that works? Joe Biden has roughly the same number of decisions, the same working and resting hours, the same capacity to figure things out as I do, or you do, or my elderly neighbor does. His decisions are different from mine, but that’s just his assignment. He solves them the same way I do, with a little knowledge, a lot of habit, and some guesswork. Each of us solves the problems that are brought to us by the interconnected world around us. All of us are chipping in; none of us is outside the system. I can claim 1/8,000,000,000 of all the influence on the success of the species, as can everybody else. Nobody has more than 1/8,000,000,00th, and nobody has less. His are more public, like most high school “things” tend to be.
Why is no one told that their thing in adolescence is a tryout and not a pledge? How many people spend a lifetime wondering what would have been if …? …if they had worked harder at their talent? … if they hadn’t listened to their parents about being more practical? … if they had followed their dream, their bliss, their wonder? No, adolescent pursuits generally don’t look like adult careers. Selling insurance, managing corporate travel, delivering produce, answering customer complaints online … these aren’t the sorts of training that high schools offer. By chance, most worldly careers are less expressive, less personal, and less public than what we trained on as teenagers. It’s a bait-and-switch. Dream big, as if public recognition is the definition of a good life, but settle for less, as if there’s a distinction in value between a sandlot baseball player and a New York Yankee or between a Yankee and an auto mechanic.
For most of high school, my only trombone competition was a kid whose name I forget from a school one county over. In tryouts for regional and state bands and orchestras, he more often took first chair, and I got second. But I was shocked out of first chair in my home school band and orchestra when a guy several seats under me, whom I had ignored and lorded over daily for years, blossomed suddenly into a faster, sweeter player than me. Humiliated, I spent the year having to take section orders from a kid I had privately mocked. The last I heard (about 45 years ago), the next-county guy held a Las Vegas musicians union card, making a decent living in casino show pit bands, and (ten years ago) my hometown nemesis was playing trombone for his evangelical church’s wind ensemble. Sounds about right. Somehow I haven’t regretted my decision to attend a college that had no music program.
The other two trombonists became virtuosic enough to make a public show of their hard work, one for a living and the other as a hobby. But I can promise you that both wondered how much further they might have gone but for that one break they didn’t get, a little more practicing, having been willing to move to another city, marrying a different person, not having kids, and on and on. The what-ifs dog even the most successful of us.
The problem with having a calling is that it looks at work as sacrificial. Because relatively speaking there are so many applicants and so few jobs for zoologists, artists, musicians, athletes, writers, or clowns, the entry pay is miserable and the odds of advancement long compared to starting out as a computer programmer, warehouse picker, or short-order cook. And the likelihood is that you’ll have to sell out your dream, at least in part, by engaging your talent under someone else’s direction rather than in service to your own desires. You don’t just sacrifice money, but also time (virtuosity requires continual practice or research), social stability (changing jobs and moving abruptly), regular hours (most of these jobs are in the public eye, where mistakes can’t be buried, and sleep tends to be disturbed), and the respect of your family of origin (who are likely to consider you childish in your pursuits).
In college I studied liberal arts instead of trombone. I wasn’t naïve as I emerged from higher education; unlike some of my peers, I had noticed that lots of children are told they’re special. While I assumed I wasn’t so special, and got busy with cracking the workplace code, I was not, shall we say, lacking in hubris. My goal wasn’t to be a great trombonist anymore; it was to be a great writer.
So lacking any instruction, practice, or discipline, I figured the best place to get them was by reporting for a newspaper. Oddly, I had never worked on a student newspaper and had written only one news article in my life – an investigative piece that grew out of my graduate studies in political science, which was published in a string of Manhattan weeklies. I parlayed that into my first daily job in upstate New York and was off and running.
Only I never got around to being a great writer. I kept getting sidetracked. First I became a publisher, and then back to writing, then an editor, then a PR and media relations guy (lying by omission for a living; now that was a trip!), then a marketing guy (another stint in the devil’s workshop!), then a corporate executive, then a coach, then whatever I am now, and whatever I’ll be next.
In no way was I following my bliss. Once I ditched newspapers, none of it felt like service or purpose, which was all right with me. I was a leaf in the wind, and I loved it, mainly because my job never became my identity. Each job would elaborate on the last one, so even though I didn’t have writing in my job descriptions anymore, that mastery came in handy throughout. I think I had two things going for me:
1. I didn’t need purpose
2. I didn’t mind being lazy
These work hand in hand. By not having purpose, I could take any job and enjoy it. It was a job, after all, a way to make money and by accident, not intention, serve others through a defined role in a wide network of jobs. Some of my jobs were repetitive, some were confusing, and none provided me with significant psychic rewards. That was my other life. Maybe my parents imbued this in me when they declined to take my public school education seriously. As my father later related to me, “We assumed you were learning more important things outside of school.” School was a place for friends and joking around, as far as I knew – activities that were constantly available between studies. I didn’t neglect my studies totally; I knew I had to get into college. And I wasn’t bright enough to get good grades without working. But I kept a balance, and got good enough grades to not impede my future. The rest of my time was mine.
Two years behind me in high school, my favorite trombonist of all, Joey Raudabaugh, shared my attitude. He was always laughing, mocking, and pranking. He even had a healthy relationship with his trombone, taking advantage of all its peculiarities – the blat tones, the brassy glissando, the farts and wails that my training in sweet tones denied. I envied his freedom with his instrument, and as a listener found myself straying from the dulcet Tommy Dorsey sounds to the reckless world of the free jazz non-virtuoso Roswell Rudd.
By ignoring the usual virtuosic tropes, Rudd, who emerged from the 1960s Lower Manhattan loft crowd, made the most of what was unique and authentic about the trombone. It’s actually a kind of terrible instrument, having to fake the agility of a trumpet, the sweetness of a French Horn, and the sonic boom of the tuba. Rudd found its heart, where it could live in its splendid rage outside the usual imitations of other, better-suited instruments. Unlike my usual jazz heroes – Dizzy and Bird and Sonny Rollins and the Ellington band – he seemed uninterested in virtuosity. What might he have learned?
Possibly the same thing the Beatles did.
In their beginning, the Beatles had a purpose, which they reminded each other of frequently. When they were feeling low about the drudge of paying their exhausting dues night after night in dank clubs, five sets a night, John would ask the others excitedly, “Where are we going, fellas?” They would answer, “To the top!” He would ask, “Where is that, fellas?” And they would answer, “To the toppermost of the poppermost!”
That was their purpose, their dream, to be bigger than Elvis. They got better and better at their instruments, their singing, their tightness, their ability to entertain and to imitate. Their song and purpose was to sell more records than anyone else. And when they had reached that goal, they no longer had a purpose. It took them about six years to get there. They didn’t know it, but they had six years more of Beatle music in them. They no longer had anything to do or to be. You know what they did? They quit worrying about being virtuosos. They quit playing their instruments or singing most days. In the Let it Be movie, George says sheepishly, “We’re not the kind of band that practices much.” They put their instrumental virtuosity on hold. Without a purpose, they could be lazy.
Rather than being inferior to the first half of their career, the second-half Beatles were arguably the most innovative, surprising, genre-bending, and influential force in the history of music. They either invented or popularized raga rock, minimalist rock, electronic music, psychedelia, heavy metal, folk rock, and continued to quote Motown girl groups, blues, ‘50s rock and roll, music hall, doo wop, surf music and bluegrass, classical and experimental, samba and reggae, all naturally, without self-consciousness, and played with precision and muscle. And with the exception of Paul, none was a virtuoso.
Instead of repeating themselves and getting better at their instruments, devoting their time to practice and perfection, they cruised the world investigating self, music, literature and art, fashion, trends, whatever. They were pioneers in Transcendental Meditation, introducing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the world. George studied sitar with India’s great master Ravi Shankar, and became an evangelist for the Hare Krishna and Yogananda Self-Realization movements. Ringo and John got into the movies, acting a bit. John dropped copious amounts of LSD and then switched to heroin. Paul scored modern dance, and hung out with John Cage, for whom Yoko Ono had been a longtime assistant. And they occasionally made a Beatle record. Making Beatle music was their job, certainly, but not their purpose. They were explorers of music, the mind, self, and pleasure. Music was a channel, a groove, that was so smooth and flowing that they didn’t have to work on it, and they could use their adequate musical chops as a dependable departure into other interests. Ultimately, only Paul seemed to identify himself primarily as a musician.
What if the point of a job isn’t virtuosity or leadership or purpose, but is a necessary role that, once mastered, can be put on cruise control so you can examine whatever wonders of the world attract you? Every job is knit into the dense web of human civilization and its extraordinary needs – mainly moving massive amounts of food and construction materials to places that due to climate and geography don’t otherwise support human lives. We’re designed for hot jungles and savannahs in a narrow band around the Equator. We live beyond the Tropics into the Arctic Circle and even Antarctica.
Everybody’s pitching in to the enterprise already, so that’s hardly a good candidate for a specialized purpose. Like I keep saying, the clerk at the souvenir T-shirt shop has about the same way of influencing his little circle as does Joe Biden. They’re both required under the rules of the species. They both have been handed their role by a web of interlocking circumstances and events.
What the Beatles understood that few of my friends do is that cruise control is better than improvement at some point. We’re all canoe guides. We learn the canoe and river so well that after a while it takes little energy to move our passengers across the lakes, and we can spend our time watching the otters frolic on the banks. If I’m constantly improving my J-stroke, I’ll miss the whole point of the natural splendors.
Cruise control isn’t lazy. It’s the gift of flow and of being able to open my eyes to everything around me while I’m getting my work done.