I had a conversation recently in which I was repeatedly offered choices: was I this kind of person, or that kind? Did I want this, or did I want that? The questions were reasonable enough. The problem was that I kept wanting to say, “Neither. Or perhaps both. It depends.”
I have been noticing how often life is like that.
My children and I have been planning a long drive to southern Ontario, where I will leave my youngest at art school. Even choosing the route became an exercise in competing goods. One way was faster. Another would let us see people we care about. Another promised a more relaxed drive and time along the Great Lakes. There was no perfect route waiting to be discovered. We had to talk, listen to one another, and decide what mattered enough to shape the journey.
Perhaps I notice this more because I have also been finishing a book about authenticity. I began it wanting to understand what it means to live truthfully. I am ending it somewhat less confident that truthfulness usually arrives as a clean answer.
Our lives are assembled from commitments that sometimes pull against one another: freedom and belonging, responsibility and desire, continuity and change. Other people have claims upon us, yet they cannot finally tell us who we are. We need stories to understand our lives, but our lives are always larger than the stories we tell about them.
There are moments when clarity matters. Some choices really do demand a yes or a no. But I am increasingly suspicious of the assumption that maturity means eliminating every ambiguity.
Sometimes the more truthful response is to remain with a question long enough for a third possibility to become visible… And sometimes the route that makes the most sense is not the shortest one.
Worth Reading: The Immediate Life and the Formation of Authenticity
The categories don’t always fit; don’t force the answer too quickly. The essay develops the philosophical reason for that: our immediate reactions are not necessarily the same thing as understanding, and agency develops partly through giving experience enough time and attention to be interpreted. Read the Essay
From the Archive: Living Abroad and Our Sense of Self
Travel can do more than change our surroundings. Sometimes it unsettles the stories we have learned to tell about ourselves. In this earlier essay, I reflected on how living abroad gave me enough distance from familiar expectations to reconsider some of the identities I had taken for granted.
What I’m Working On:
I’m in the final stages of revising The Architecture of Authenticity, a book I’ve been working on for some time about what it means to become a truthful self. Much of the recent work has involved the ending: how to write about agency, community, spiritual life, and the limits of our own self-understanding without pretending that a human life can ever be reduced to a final formula. Finishing the book has made me more interested in good questions—and somewhat less interested in tidy answers.
A Question for You:
Where in your life are you being asked to choose between options that don’t quite fit?
Until next time,
Ray
