Aberrant

As the garage door creeps up its track like an aging rollercoaster, acrid paint fumes waft under my nose.  I’m parking the car left of center now, as I’m sharing space with my teenagers who have outfitted a man cave designed for their latest foray into the arts.  Furnished with lawn chairs, a wooden workbench, repurposed skateboards and remnants of a big-screen TV, they work under shop lighting rescued from the basement, their monster music blaring as they cut stencils to contain the spray paint that imparts their designs on any surface imaginable.

Art is in their blood, the same way it is in mine. I’ve seen it manifest itself over and over again in drawings on bedroom walls, plastic drinking bottle sculptures, duct tape clothing, embroidery floss bracelets and various found-art media:  chalk on sidewalks, sand on beaches, snow on a frozen pond. They can try to deny it or cast it aside, but they are infused with a creativity that colors every speck of their worlds.

And this is how it is with our passions, those talents we are truly meant to explore, exploit and export.  Our gifts are deliberately designed to be irresistible and irrefutable to us. What a clever way to ensure that we are inevitably led to happiness. 

So if we’re programmed to gravitate toward our strengths why do so many of us suffer in jobs we don’t care for, leaving our dreams unfulfilled?

Sometimes our passions are off the beaten path.  When we were younger, we acquiesced to the wishes of our parents.  I know plenty of adults who became the professional mom or dad wanted them to be as a requisite for a funded education, only to change careers later in life.  In my generation, you may have received half-hearted encouragement to go for what you really wanted with the caveat you get a teaching degree “to fall back on”.

Today’s world is different.  The most ambitious entrepreneurs are starting businesses in college dorm rooms.  A tiny handful of true risk takers abandon their educations in favor of following creative dreams.  But most of us still guide our children to take the safe route.  They should pursue degrees in higher education because it seems more probable that they’ll find success and monetary rewards in these familiar and accepted surroundings. The white collar world is the coveted place to be, and anymore, no one will look at you without a college degree.

I remember my own decision to pursue interior design.  Seeking independence and emancipation from the responsibilities and constraints of the oldest child in a 7-person family, I knew I wanted to go to college.  I had the grades, and parameters were set.  It would be a state school, and I wanted the biggest.  Having finished an interior design course in public high school, I decided this was a form of art I could pursue that would satisfy the requirement that I end up with a steady job upon receipt of a degree.

Ironically, I spent twelve years in a career I wasn’t particularly good at.  Working my way up from technical drawing positions to true design, I discovered I was surrounded by colleagues who were far more talented and most importantly, confident and courageous in their work.  It wasn’t until I found myself on the business side of things that I found my true calling.  I went from counting the minutes until I could pick up and leave for the day to wondering where the hours in the day went. 

I followed the popular, prescribed path for my generation. An undergraduate degree at a Big Ten university was more than respectable at the time.  But I didn’t end up any more satisfied with my original career choice because of it.

And I’m not alone.  I used to love those interviews with successful businesspeople that the Chicago Tribune published years ago in the business section of the Sunday paper.  There was a chronological history of the path each individual took to get from the first job as a high school babysitter to the present.  I was always fascinated and inspired by the people who took the circuitous paths.

Ten may be the new fifteen in today’s world, but I don’t believe most kids have any better idea of what they want to do with the rest of their lives than we did a generation ago. What they decide to do today may not be what they are doing twenty years from now. It all comes together when you love what you are doing so much that you find the courage to immerse yourself completely. But no one can predict when exactly that will be.

And maybe that’s why I allow my boys to use our home as a canvas for just about any project they can think of:  I want them to get comfortable trying new things, so it’s not so scary to look for what they love and go after it. I want them to find the courage within themselves much earlier in life than I did.

A friend reminded me recently that my boys are not following the ubiquitous path of the average honor student – athlete because I allow it to be different.  She’s right.  I am wide open to the path less traveled because that’s where we all find ourselves.

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”  --  Robert Frost