Doing your best under the circumstances

Doing your best under the circumstances

Posted on August 2nd, 2011 by Frank Wilson

Recently, I posted on my blog as a “thought for the day” this quote from Jean de La Fontaine: “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”

My own life offers evidence in support of this. I was the editor of my college newspaper (co-editor, actually: I shared the duties with a colleague, because I was also the main editorial writer), but when I graduated I had no intention whatever of becoming a journalist, principally because the idea of facing deadlines on a daily basis did not appeal.

I was notorious among my colleagues on the college paper for somehow always managing to meet deadlines at the very last moment. But the college newspaper was a weekly. To have to meet a deadline immediately — to be told at 3 in the afternoon that a piece needed to be done by 5 — well, that sort of pressure wasn’t something I wanted any part of.

As it happened, of course, I ended up working for a newspaper for the greater part of 30 years. I even grew sort of fond of those tight impromptu deadlines. Like the prospect of hanging, they focused the mind wonderfully. You couldn’t even think of procrastinating. And no one expected literature. You didn’t have to pause from time to time and second-guess yourself, because your editor would do that for you when the time came. All you had to do was the best you could under the circumstances. Surprisingly, what you came up with as often as not was as good as what you would have had you had more time.

Actually, I’ve never gotten very far in life by devising any plan of action. I’ve mostly just taken advantage of whatever opportunity came my way. I’m also the sort of person who tends to make the best of whatever situation I find myself in. At any rate, it was just such an opportunity that got me into the newspaper business and that, of course, eventually led to my landing a job I had wanted since I was in high school: that of book review editor for a newspaper.

But do I contradict myself? I dreamed of becoming a newspaper book editor, but had no interest in journalism? The contradiction is only apparent. Once I realized what was involved in writing for a newspaper, I just figured the idea of being a book review editor was not realistic.

I have always preferred to follow the course of least resistance. You need a job. So find one that you don’t dislike and that pays reasonably well. Then get on with the business of living. (Oddly, I never wanted to be one of those people whose jobs were the focus of their lives, and yet that is pretty much how it turned out for me anyway. As Henry Miller said, happiness consists in finding a more or less pleasant way of passing the time: I ended up passing a good deal of my time working at a job I happened to enjoy.)

I doubt if any grand inference can be drawn from any of this, but I am reminded of a book that more people should know of: Georg Groddeck’s The Book of the It. Groddeck (1866-1934) was a German physician who specialized in the treatment of the chronically ill. He was quite unorthodox and something of a pioneer in the field of psychosomatic medicine. The Book of the It is written in the form of letters to a lady friend and its point, very broadly stated, is that we do not live as deliberately as we like to think. Rather, we are lived by what Groddeck calls the It, which I think it fair to describe as the unconscious personified. The It knows better than we do and often leads us where we would not of our own volition go.

In a collection of his writings titled the Meaning of Illness, Groddeck wrote that “he who draws the conclusion that I mentally medicate a human who has broken his leg is very true — but I adjust the fracture and dress the wound. And then — I give him a massage, make exercises with him, give a daily bath to the leg with water at 45°C for half an hour and I take care that he does neither gorge nor booze, and every now and then I ask him: Why did you break your leg, you yourself ?”

Of course, it is not the conscious self that broke the leg, but the It, which is more you than yourself. I suppose I owe my career to mine.