Predicting

Many years ago I knew a guy named Alan. We were both regulars at the Nelson Coffeehouse, where he would often play the banjo. In spite of that we become friends. For his day job, Alan was a minister in one of those pristine white churches that characterize our small New England villages. He seemed to enjoy his work, and I suspect he did okay at it. At the time he was also going to graduate school, to become qualified as a therapist, and his rationale was thus: he was on the threshold of being forty, and he was predicting that some time in the next decade he was going go have a mid-life crises which would, among other things, create a desire for a career change. He wanted to have alternative credentials in the bag so that when that happened, he could just turnkey into his new line of work.

Even at the time this struck me as being potentially unreliable, and in the intervening decades I’ve learned a lot more about how unpredictable life can be. Suppose, I wondered at the time, your midlife crisis revealed a desire to instead become a chef, or a stone mason? After all, being a therapist and being a minister are not that far apart – it seemed unlikely that the new career would fully satisfy a desire for something new.

I lost track of Alan after a couple of years, and while it’s possible that nothing occurred, I think he was so determined to have his mid-life crises that, if it hadn’t happened, he would have invented it. Most of my friends from that era who I have kept in touch with have experienced twists and turns. Some went through unanticipated challenges and have emerged renewed, a few were broken, and some did not survive.

As I write these words Hurricane Gustav is descending on the Gulf Coast. By the time you are reading this a lot more will be known, but even though it is technically easy, I will not be coming back in to revise this blog – what you read is what I am writing late Monday morning. For obvious reasons this particular hurricane inspires thoughts (and indeed emotions) about being prepared: heeding warnings, having a sound infrastructure and tools to cope. I have no doubt that hindsight will reveal a lot that could have been done that wasn’t. There will be displays of humanity at its best and its worst. We’ll talk about this for a while, until the next crisis comes along.

People want to be able to predict what will happen in their lives. We are obsessed with forecasts: weather, the economy, our personal fates. Yet how boring it would be if we knew. I once worked for a publicly traded company whose upper management demanded so much forecasting data from the salespeople that they didn’t have much time left to sell anything, and as a result, revenues (which were predicted with varying degrees of accuracy) were not nearly what they might have been. But suppose we  had predicted with 100% accuracy, results that met stockholders goals. That would be good for a quarter, and then they’d create higher expectations.

Life is dynamic. Exhilarating. Tragic. Rich. Unpredictable. We can predict the hurricane, but we can’t predict what it will do. And that's what keeps us going.