Jump the Rails
I continue to procrastinate in the launching of Bending the Map. To fill the hiatus and keep the momentum alive, I have instead chosen to dip my toe in the water and start a conversation around exploration, curiosity, uncertainty, and ambiguousness. I believe these elements to be critical in the pursuit of personal passion and, ultimately, the identification of purpose.
In pursuing this objective, I find I am meandering and struggling to illuminate the truth of it; such is its esoteric and maverick nature. Those of you who are following this conversation will attest perhaps to some resistance to these notions, particularly when the time has come to put it into practice.
The resistance I am experiencing is challenging to define. Often shrouded in unrelenting commitments and conventions all strenuously justified, my invitations to people to make space for thought, contemplation and curiosity are often repelled like two magnets facing north towards each other.
In this, Bertrand Russel would contribute: “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death…Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.”
It is curious to me that I have heard, at different times over the years, that age-weary saying “she’s gone off the rails.” I mean, when you think about it, who in the rubbery f#&! wants to be on rails? What is a rail but an inverted rut? And being in a rut is understood and known to be undesirable. The assertion should not be, hmm, yes, you went off the rails there, but rather a sympathetic, oh dear, how sad, what on earth got you back on the rails?
Is it sloth as in both or sloth as in moth? Whatever the correct pronunciation, it is sloth and apathy that puts us back on the rails. To slide down onto the rails and be carried unprotestingly forward. It’s safer. Easier. Known. A life off the rails is an adventure. Uncertain. Unchartered. Potentially dangerous.
As we head towards the end of the week, do please jump off the rails. Take a different path. Afterall:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken)