The Part You Keep Skipping Is Your Life
If there is any magic to adulthood, it is the increasing ability to dream about processes more than outcomes.
I imagine that we all start out with pictures, black and white pictures that add color over time. At first our pictures are like undeveloped film, then time does the trick—grains of yellow, blue, olive, red, orange, and tangerine, iridescent sparks of violet and sky. They pit themselves into the frame and glow like miniature moons. But the process is slow, so agonizingly slow! And our society is not. So we all believe, at one point or another, that we can outtrick the trick itself and find ourselves, in some other place or at some other time or with some other person, a picture already done, swapping black and white for full color, skipping over the chore of waiting, without realizing that what we continue to skip is life itself.
I told my therapist in a recent session that what I wanted, most of all, was to know the color of time, to see the picture fleshen out with dazzling darks and brights. I was talking about my relationship, but also my career. Also my writing. I was talking about every aspect of life that requires maturation, which is every aspect of life: our love, our language, our work, our belonging (to a neighborhood, city, or country—and while we’re at it: to the world, to ourselves).
When I was younger, I spent a great deal of my time dreaming of a finished picture: a happier me, a loving community, a fulfilling career, a list of life experiences checked off with golden marks. In those visions, it was the sense of arrival that emboldened me. Drawing the line from A to B and riding it like a zipline, skipping the distance and ending at the result, is what made dreaming so addictive. Imagining myself more complete, more rich, and more free was the stimulant that ran beneath the momentum of my twenties. When I found myself feeling too black and white, my appetite outpacing the color, I switched: cities, jobs, ideas. At a certain point, though, the promise of a dream—that we might arrive somewhere without having to walk there—seemed to be more of a crutch, as opposed to a boon. I thought I might have lost the ability to dream, that maybe it was a symptom of growing up. Maybe it was the wars, the billionaires, or the politicians. Maybe it was the platforms.
Or maybe I just dream differently now.
When the picture in front of us feels too drab, we want to exchange it for something brighter, something more vivid. We believe that we can leave this picture, walk down the hall, and find the perfect replacement. A new, improved, optimized picture, ablaze with color and passion. We believe that that picture will be complete, and maybe for a time it is, until it is not. And so we walk further down the hall again, retracing our steps, taking different turns, leaving one picture for another so that the color never fully develops, until we are lost in a maze of pictures, none of which look like our own.
The human desire to skip over the process and fast forward to the result is universal. It aligns with the society that we live in, in which the stories, products, and art we consume are delivered to us like frozen meals in a microwave, all the details of their making removed from perspective. Yet the human experience is, if one thing, a process. If we want to have lived a meaningful life, we have to live each day of it, even the ones that feel lackluster. If we want to learn a language, we have to study it, speak it, and read it, even while we do not understand it. If we want to share life with another person, we have to choose to do so every day, including the moments in which choosing the opposite may better satisfy our immediate desires.
Research backs this up: After decades studying what actually sustains human wellbeing, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan concluded that what satisfies our deepest psychological needs is not reaching a goal, but genuinely engaging with a process. Happiness, they posited, is less a destination we arrive at than a byproduct of the ongoing decision to stay.
If there is any magic to adulthood, it is the increasing ability to dream about processes more than outcomes. The other day a friend of mine asked me what I was most proud of this year. I said that I was happier than I was last year, and I feel like I am growing up: I no longer want to walk into my perfect life, I want to walk in the life that I am living.
I want time to have passed, to have filled the ink with color. To have had the opportunity to look at the picture in front of me for as much time as I have had, and then to keep looking at it until the colors change, in the light of day and night, with the decomposition of my skin and the loosening of my memory, until I notice that the grains of ink that make the picture a picture are never the same, for neither are we, and neither is this day, and how much it means to have chosen to be here, instead of always rushing on to something else. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
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