A Pilgrim’s Digression

Sitting in the dentist chair this morning, I picked up a Reader’s Digest and flipped to an interview with Tina Fey. I have no pretensions towards intellectual curiosity here. The hook for the article promised to reveal her favorite stooge (she likes Larry, the middle man).

However, what really stuck with me about this interview was a comment she made when asked if she sees her humor as a gift. She replied, “Every kid has something they’re good at, that you hope they find and gravitate toward. This is my thing. I don’t think I was supposed to be a gymnast and accidentally landed on this.”

People say things like that all the time. It’s a concession to fate or destiny which, ironically, most people deny plays much of a role in their life. Ask them straight up, do you believe in fate or free will, and they will say “free will.” Rational people want to believe they have control over their lives. Plus, to advocate for the self-made life is as purly American as a flag lapel pin.

To delve a little deeper, does every kid really have one thing they are good at and “gravitate toward” it? Fey says we “hope” kids do. In the end, hope may be all there is.

There are plenty of people who never achieve their potential; maybe they never even realize they had any potential. Whatever a kid may hope for or wish to be in life, there are any number of factors that determine whether the child finds the thing they are good at and gravitate towards it. On this question, I often think of one of my mom’s sisters, who has a certain amount of artistic ability. But she grew up in the same impoverished, uneducated household as my mother, and instead of ever fulfilling her potential, she is now a middle-aged woman working in a sweltering factory. As for her artistic talent, she paints country landscapes on pieces of slate to sell at flea markets.

I don’t come down strictly on one side or other of the free will versus fate, or nature versus nurture argument. But I tend to come down more on the side of fate/nature. There are too many factors beyond the control of individuals which determine the outcome of a life. Luck is a big part of it. Being in the right place at the right time. Knowing the right people. Being born into the right family, or the right socio-economic stratum.

Much of a child’s future is determined by whether his/her parents have money. Can they send the child to the best schools? Can they provide a variety of experiences, maybe through travel or enrollment in sports or other extra-curricular activities? Do the parents themselves value education, reading, intellectual achievement?

Thinking back on my own experience, what if my parents had been more encouraging about going to college? Or even if they had just been able to give me advice? My parents actually wanted me to join the military, which of course is not a bad option. It might even have helped me, if it provided a better opportunity for a college education than I actually received.

I’ll never forget the enormous disappointment of not being able to go to the college of my choice. I’ve told this story many times (my wife is probably rolling her eyes right now, if she’s reading this). My first two years of college were spent in a community college, because I essentially wasted my senior year. I really had no clue what I was supposed to do in order to get into a good school.

I let application deadlines slip past and drifted, clueless but with growing concern about my future, through the entire year. Finally, in the summer of ‘91, community college was the only thing left to me. However, by the time I had to move on to a regular four year school for the winter/spring semester in 1993, I had English professors who were interested in me and advising me as best they could. Some of the advice I got was simply in the form of pointers to good schools. Today, looking back, it seems like these teachers were as clueless as I was, in terms of what was possible for me.

I applied to Emory and even Princeton, for example, as well the University of the South in Tennessee. The University of the South is where I decided I really wanted to go, after reading about it. Of all the schools where I applied, it was also the only good school that showed any interest in me. Princeton rejected me so fast I don’t even think they looked beyond my SAT scores.

I received an invitation to visit the University of the South, however, and after much cajoling my parents agreed to drive to Sewanee, Tennessee with me to visit. The more I saw of the campus, the more I fell in love with that school. I loved the gothic architecture, the quiet, English feel of the campus, with Seniors attending classes in gowns as if they were Oxford undergrads. It also has a great English program and is the home of the literary journal, The Sewanee Review, so I think it would have been a good fit for me.

Then came the sit-down with the financial aid officer. In retrospect, I think my parents always knew it was going to be impossible for me to go there, unless I received scholarships and loans to cover everything. My parents were always overly cautious about debt, though, so I don’t think they would even have allowed me to consider school loans. Anyway, the subject never came up. At that time, tuition and fees at Sewanee were over $19,000.00 a semester.

Although I wouldn’t receive the official rejection letter for a week or two (it said my grades in Math and my score on the Math portion of the SAT were not good enough), I nonetheless had a long, dejected car trip back to West Virginia. I knew the dream had died that day. And in the end, I went to West Virginia University to finish my education.

Of course, good things came from that circumstance, not the least of which is I met my wife at WVU. I still ended up with a Masters Degree and a good job.

And of course I made choices along the way that determined my future. My senior year of high school, I made a choice to procrastinate and never properly find out what the best course would be for myself, over the next four years. Maybe I could have worked harder in school, made more of an effort to improve my math skills, sought advice and guidance from teachers instead of waiting for them to give it.

Also, my life has been characterized by a reluctance to take risks. When I applied to graduate schools, I was accepted at the University of Virginia as well as West Virginia University. UVA would have been the better choice. But i chose the less risky option. I was already settled in Morgantown, West Virginia, and it would require little risk on my part. Moving to Charlottesville was a risky proposition–would I like it there, would I thrive in UVA’s English program, or would it prove too difficult for me?– and in the end I didn’t take it.

My decision was helped along by the fact that WVU was willing to give me a teaching assistant position, with tuition and fees fully covered, while UVA gives its students no financial assistance during their first year.

So, for better or worse, I’ve made my choices. Or looked at another way, maybe my risk-averse personality made these choices for me.

Or maybe it was all meant to work out this way in the first place, in which case nothing I could have done would have resulted in me going to the University of the South instead of West Virginia University. And maybe even if I had went to the University of the South, I still would be in the exact same place I am today, or a comparable position.

Free will versus fate. A psychologist I studied as an undergraduate, Carl Rogers, wrote of how the idea of human potential, or of an “ideal self” as he called it, can be challenging but also destructive. If we can never achieve our potential because of a mixture of environmental and psychological strictures, this can lead to neurosis.

Sometimes I think the happiest people are those with no sense of their own potential at all. Someone whose only goal is to make a little more money is probably happier in the long run than the person who feels they “ought” to have been a doctor…or an artist, or an actor, or a writer.

In one respect, my parents knew better than me. I had an exaggerated idea of the kind of college I could attend. My parents knew it would be impossible. They just never had the heart to tell me, with all due respect to the American dream, you can’t always achieve something just because you want it badly enough.