#288: Moving On and Moving Through
I have been reading Rob's wonderful writing for years. And I've always appreciated his ability to take a seemingly customary occurrence and put into words his own profound interpretation of it. His doing so has inspired me to reflect more on my experiences/encounters with others that I cross paths with, and to then consider new perspectives that may be evident through these small moments or connections, as sometimes they reveal a new learning to ponder. Thank you, Rob. I wish the woman you met on the plane that day could read this.
- Amanda
Moving On And Moving Through
Do you ever wish you could just start over?
Right before Thanksgiving I was on my last (and only my third of the year) business trip. The woman next to me on the plane noticed I was working on a presentation, and we struck up a conversation about our respective jobs. She wasn’t happy in hers.
She said to me “I wish I could just start my job over. I’ve been the head of marketing at this tech company for 3 years now, and now that I know what I know, I would do so many things differently.”
Then, she sighed heavily and said – “but we can’t, right?. It’s like that quote ‘the only way out is through.’ She seemed sad.
At the time I didn’t think much about it, but a few days later I started thinking about that quote. It really bugged me. It was the word “only” that I was stuck on. “The ONLY way out is through?” I looked it up, and found it’s been attributed to everyone from JK Rowling, to Carl Jung, Shakespeare, and Robert Frost. It’s usually taken to mean that the only way out is to embrace the pain and move through whatever ordeal we are going through at the time. That still felt icky to me.
Frost was the most commonly cited, so I looked into it. It seems that there is some context missing from the original quote. The phrase itself comes from his wonderful poem “A Servant to Servants”, which is the beautifully sad tale of a woman talking about her daily ordeals to a visitor who is camping out in the forest near her house. As the woman talks about her life, she mentions her husband, Len, who she says “always looks at the bright side of life”. She says:
“Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.
He says the best way out is always through.
And I agree to that, or in so far
As that I can see no way out but through –“
It was the very subtle difference between what her husband said and what the woman heard that I was looking for. You see, Len implies to his wife that she has a choice about where she finds herself – but that the best option is to choose to move through it. But the woman in the poem sees no such choice. Through her lens she can “see no way out but through.” It’s preordained.
There’s so much talk these days about leaving the thing we’re doing and starting over. It’s my experience that so many often feel like my colleague in the airplane. From her view there is no “starting over” or moving on without completely upending everything. As she said with a sigh, “we can’t start over”. There is only living through what you might have done differently.
She thinks the only choice is to move through it because she doesn’t feel like she can move on.
I wish I could find her again to talk. What I have found is that, yes, there are those few times in life where I know I must leave, start over, move on because it’s clear that forward motion has completely stopped.
But, wow aren’t there so many more times where it’s messier than that? There are things I wish I did, or didn’t do, and would make the current situation better if I could start over. But then I also still feel strongly that I should persevere and move through despite whatever it is that’s making me feel badly.
I think there's merit in realizing there's a choice: to let go of the past and start over any time we want. It’s like that wonderful scene in the show Ted Lasso, when Coach Ted says to Sam that goldfish are the happiest animal in the world, because they only have a 10 second memory. “Be a Goldfish, Sam”, Ted Says.
For my colleague at the airport that could mean simply letting go of all those things she would do over, and looking at her next day at work like it was brand new. For others of us (cough, me) it might mean looking at that half-written book we’ve been “working on” for the last six months and realizing that it no longer serves the purpose we thought it would, and just choosing the delete button. Or, it might be finally choosing to press forward and making the decision to leave that job which can no longer be tolerated.
I think Len in the poem had it right. Persevering through something is not the only way out. It’s the best choice because I get to choose it or not. The hard part is convincing myself that, indeed, there is a choice.
Whether it’s a job, a relationship, or staying in the same place, it’s not that the only way out is through. But I think through will always be the best way out because I can also choose that moving through is also moving on.