The Road Less Traveled

Making a decision to be anything (career wise) when you are 17 or 18 is absurd, but we are all forced to forge our paths early on. I guess men and women have always done this, but when we used to have a life expectancy of 30 to 40, there was little time to get stuff done.

As my daughters have moved forward and had to make these decisions, I have had some time to reflect on the process. We start to indoctrinate kids very early with those “what do you want to be when you grow up” kinds of questions and they have to eventually learn a response. My oldest son was torn between his parents opposite wishes for him to be a lawyer or a musician. He did the best a child could do and became a lawyer and a musician. This is a rare if not insane gift and one which made both of his parents proud.

My eldest daughter has followed a musical path which I sort of convinced her to decide, not so much because I felt she needed to be a musician, but because it just seemed to be the way she was going and she was making other career choices for the sake of common sense. I chose no sense and eased her into musicianship which may or may not have been a good move, only time will tell.

My two other sons chose interesting paths, although one was on his own tape and did what he wanted and became a successful banker, which truly was the way he was when he was a kid. He was the only one in the house with money!

My youngest son who has a career in health care information (whatever that may be) studied to be an artist. He did what I wanted him to do and found it interesting but not the path to a successful life as he saw fit. So, he found unique ways to go. All of his exploration we owe to an art education which teaches you to find and solve your own problems, and in fact allows you to become what you’d like to be.

Now my youngest daughter is moving toward journalism on her own, as it seemed to come from within, and was certainly nothing either of us suggested.

It seems impossible to understand choices. My own trip made no sense to my parents, and I find no direct tie into anything I brought to the table, although I have a cousin who is an artist and another, on the other side of my family, who is an art teacher. Maybe there was some genetic link somewhere to make these things happen.

My two musicians must link somewhere but I can’t put it together as my mother-in-law is a professional violinist but has no connection with my oldest son the lawyer/musician so my link is missing. I was surprised when in about 1955 or so my father was sitting on our piano bench and started to play the piano, something he had never done before in my presence and never did afterwards. Maybe there was a much hidden genetic link.

 I know none of this has to be nature, and nurture may be the answer. We all do not become what our parents were. I certainly didn’t do what my parents wanted me to do or expected me to do. I did however go to college which was expected so in that respect I followed their directions.

My questions and thoughts are so many:

Do we have ancestral ties to our career choices, genetic links?

Given the cultural shifts we have experienced, all of this may not matter as my people were forced to wander around the world and art was not really portable.

My wife has a grandfather who was a photographer, and maybe he’s the link in her visual arts background.

Maybe this is all stupid and we just do what we want to do, or are programmed to do (?) or, we happened to be standing in the right place at the right time and ended up with the right answer because of it.

I am continuously confused these kind of choices. I spent much of my life in post-secondary education dealing with mainly students and faculty who had made the same kind of decision I had made, and who all knew (or thought they knew) that they wanted to be artists. I cannot imagine wanting to be an accountant. I can’t imagine wanting to be a dentist. It’s not that there is a thing wrong with being these quite lucrative professionals, I just can’t imagine having that as a desire. But that’s me. And yet, I can imagine really wanting to be a musician, an actor or a dancer. I guess I’m just hard wired that way.

When, years ago I took a professional aptitude test the results showed that the only career path open to me was to be an artist or a musician. These would be frightening results for some parent to see, but for a 50 year old artist, it made complete sense.