I think He has made us free, really free, to devise our own patterns. I don’t think that God has a plan for each of us, as we used to be told. “Man first exists and then defines himself.” Try to live with the idea that your child is making up his life as he goes along, as you are doing, rather than fitting the life to a preconceived pattern. To those parents, let me recommend an existential serenity about your children. But most parents, if they think back, will recognize that time and chance have caused many changes in the lives they once planned. One woman out of a thousand never considered any other possible husband. One man out of a thousand recognized his future wife the instant he met her. A very few have had one job and one only since they started work. Or when their 20-year-old son informs them that he’s going to spend the summer working on a fishing boat out of Galveston instead of clerking in Uncle John’s insurance office.Ī few parents may be able to look back at their lives and affirm that at 20 their ambition was to do exactly what they are doing today. If parents would reflect on how many chances and coincidences and serendipitous encounters and trivial events have shaped their own lives, they might feel calmer when they see their 20-year-old daughter majoring in philosophy with no idea of what gainful employment that might lead to. Then we look back and call our career by the shape it has assumed. A talk with a stranger on an airplane, or a sentence in a book, turns the world around and we switch directions.Įxistentialism - building our lives out of the materials that come to hand - that’s the way most of us do it. People’s hobbies become their professions. We’ll even teach you if you’re interested.” So they taught him and he was good at it, and he went on to become a successful designer of books. But the employer said to him, “Look, do you know anything about printing, layout, stuff like that? We’re hurting for somebody in production. Things like this happen: Joe Clements answered an ad for a job as a book salesman. Only when we look back do we define them as major influences. The important people in our lives come unheralded and even unrecognized. They come about because of some encounter or event that at the time seems trifling. The crucial movements of our lives are often unplanned. Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the prophets of existentialism, says that man first exists and then defines himself. My proper profession, as I define it after living it, is to be a college professor with publishing experience. Was that a mistake, then, that I made in my youth? Were all those New York years a waste, a wrong turn that kept me from my proper profession? I don’t think so. I went to graduate school, got my master’s and doctoral degrees, and now I’m a college professor. But in late middle age I began to think that teaching might after all be a rewarding profession. I eventually made a career in a New York literary agency that represented some famous authors. Teaching, I thought, was a dull and stodgy career. I refused it without a second thought, even though I didn’t have a job. When I graduated from college I was offered a fellowship for graduate study leading to a teaching position. Most of us, I think, are living a different story than the one we worked out when we were 20.
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