Mosaic not a ladder

We just came through a restructure at work, and I and 33 of my colleagues got a new boss, who's been with our company about 18 months but hasn't bossed anyone until now. He met with us to introduce himself and talk about the new structure and our new roles, and everything was really vague and ill-defined which frustrated many folks, but one thing he said as part of his introduction really stuck with me.

It was a bit of advice he got from a boss of his once, which was "Think of your career as a mosaic, not a ladder."

This has stayed with me but not with respect to my career, which has been and continues to be a ladder, but with respect to my life. When I have those "how did I get here" thoughts, in those moments of residual grief for the future I thought I was going to have that didn't come about, the idea that my life is a mosaic has been powerfully comforting. No, that's not the right word - sort of exciting, actually, or infused with a spirit of creative improvisation.

Like tonight I was feeling a bit emotional, coming down off a huge couple of weeks (see next post for more on that) and had a strong desire to go buy myself some pens at the Office Max near my house, and while I was in the store I wandered around to see if there were any other nice office presents I could buy myself, and holding the pack of pens and wandering around an office supply store to comfort myself I thought of how many, many times in my life I have done that. And started to think the sorry-for-myself thought, "How did I get here, alone again, shopping for pens alone again?" But then I remembered about the mosaic, and the experience turned into, "I am shopping for pens again. I shopped for them back then, and now I am here shopping for them now, and they're just two tiles in the quilt. I might shop for pens alone one day when I'm 90, and I might have a steady partner for another batch of 10 years in between now and then, and I might not be in Wisconsin forever and didn't intend to be but now I am, and that's that."

All sorts of possible sappy endings about the crazy quilt patchwork of life, blah blah blah. But if I stop thinking of my life as a ladder requiring linear progress and achievement, which it isn't anyway whether I'm okay with that or not, but if I get okay with that, then I am just buying pens, here now. And it's no kind of failure or disappointment to be doing so. Which was stupid to think that it was. But it's not.