Where is there?

A blueprint of a house - Public Domain

Where do you go from here?

This is a question I ask myself frequently. Like, out loud, but to myself.

Yes, I do talk to myself. Probably more than is recommended when assessing the practice for mental health reasons.

My mother talks to herself. I suspect my sisters do to, but I doubt they’d admit that.

Back to the question.

I’m often at a loss for direction, unless I’m on a planned bike riding from point A to point B or a big circle from point A back to point A. Or, when I’m cooking and want to take the recipe to a new level. Even though it’s no man’s land, I kind of know where I want to take things.

I’ve never been able to read blueprints. When I’d frame up houses as a young guy, I’d leave the visionary stuff to the older builders and just put nails where the foreman made a mark on the two by fours that made up the walls. The first time someone tried to put me in charge and told me to lay out walls, I told them I can’t read blueprints, and only Dr. Seuss would appreciate what might happen if they put me in charge.

I don’t make plans. I don’t draw up blueprints for success. I don’t give a lot of thought to what comes next. I have lived my entire life in the moment.

I don’t rely on maps very often, though I’m over-reliant on Google to tell me how to get where I want to go.

But what happens when you don’t know where you want to go next?

The endless scroll

Life can get to be an endless scroll. I hate Netflix for this reason. I turn on the TV and go to Netflix and can’t think of a single thing to watch. So, I scroll and look at tiny tiles trying to decide what I feel like. It’s the same with Spotify. Can’t think of a song I want to hear, so I rely on an algorithm to tell me what I like based on what I’ve already listened to.

Don’t want to work out or do the dishes? Scroll through Twitter mindlessly for two hours. Could’ve read an actual book and improved my knowledge and well-being, but I scrolled through TikTok watching woodworking projects and telling myself I could build something like that if I just put my mind to it.

It’s not unironic that entire periods of human history were laid down on papyrus scrolls. There is something about the endless scroll that is part and parcel of the human experience.

I don’t really want to keep scrolling anymore. I want to stop and look up and think about something tangible and then go in a certain direction and make that happen. All things that are never actually covered in a social media post. Our lives have become a series of jump cuts. We talk in jump cuts. We think in jump cuts.

When I was first learning how to tell video stories, they made us think about how we could create a visual experience in three minutes that never suspended reality. Did you start outside and need to end up inside? You better get some B-roll of opening a door. Did a person drive to a certain location every day and watch the sunset? You better show them driving.

Establishing shots have all gone away today. We just drop vegetables on a knife and then jump-cut to them all chopped up on the cutting board.

I’m going to be 49 in 16 days. Fifty is just a number, and it doesn’t scare me. But I’m not where I wanted to be by that age. In some ways, I’ll never be where I wanted to be by that age, but it does make me think about where do I go from here?

You re-write your life daily. Unless you’re a meticulous planner, and then you probably just re-write your life weekly or monthly. I sometimes re-write my life every five minutes, but that is because I spend 90 percent of my life in the moment.

The other problem for me is the part where I wonder where is there? If I’m asking: Where do I go from here? There is an implied there, and I don’t know what there is. I don’t know the trajectory. I don’t know the next point. I don’t know what it looks like when I get there. How will I know I’m there?

But you can’t scroll forever. Well, you can scroll until you die, and I’m so tired of the endless scroll.

So, I’ll do what I’ve always done and not worry about the next moment or what there is. I will take a step in this moment, the one I’m comfortable living in, and then take another step. I won’t worry about a direction, because they’re all cardinal. I’ll drag this moment along with me or keep stepping into the moment on some trajectory that probably includes adventure, love, knowledge, curiosity satisfied and other forms of satisfaction, or whatever that means individually.