The Fig Tree

Chasing perfection, embracing humanity, and learning how to muddle through the beautifully messy process of figuring out what to do with your life.

I was driving home from Calgary earlier today, thinking about the way life works out. How, when you’re younger, you feel like everything is still unfurling in front of you, richly tapestried and full of mystery. And then, at some point (I think I just started noticing it within the past few years), it feels like you’re standing more solidly in the middle of things.

You can look back and see decades of decisions laid out under your feet; lose entire afternoons tracing the patterns and following the threads, going over every individual stitch to understand how it all came together.

I love a good retrospective, but I also wish you could do that in the moment, while you’re still in it. I wish there was a way to get that same level of perspective during the messier bits of life. From experience, I know that these times are usually the most transformative and fruitful, they yield the greatest rewards, and there really isn’t a better way to get through them than to simply keep going.

But when you’re in the thick of it, it just feels like you’re standing there with a whole mess of tangled threads, not entirely sure what they’re going to turn into, tentatively picking up this one and then that, pulling at them at random, trying to figure out which one will lead you forward.