Life as an Open Field

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Some imagine life as a mountain to climb, its value measured by the height we reach. Others imagine a river, and ask whether we should follow its current or struggle upstream. In Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, Pavel imagines looking back at the end of his life, able to account for his years without shame and to say that he devoted himself to a worthy cause. There is power in that answer. Knowing what one lives for gives a person something to offer their life to.

But what should a life be?

The word should seems to assume a measure we can all share. Our routes may differ, but perhaps we are expected to arrive at the same place before our lives can count as worthwhile. Yet we encounter different worlds and have different choices available to us. Even what we mean by worthwhile may differ. A life can deserve our respect without supplying an answer for everyone.

I have little basis for answering on anyone else’s behalf. I would only like to explain why, to me, life has come to feel like an open field.

Let us imagine someone who has achieved everything they wanted. They have finished their education, found the work they hoped for, and received the recognition they sought. Every condition in the old promise—“Once this happens, things will be all right”—has been met. Let us be more generous still: spare them illness, hardship, and unforeseen disaster. From now on, they need never worry about getting by.

What will they do when they wake tomorrow morning?

They can rest. They can enjoy what they have. There is nothing wrong with that. But suppose something they never considered begins to interest them: an unfamiliar sound, a new question, a way of living they had previously overlooked. It was absent from their original wishes. It cannot make their already complete record of achievement any more complete. Still, they want to move toward it. Where has that wish come from?

We have arranged the outcomes of their life. We have no way to arrange in advance who they will become upon reaching them. The person at the destination has experiences that the person setting out did not have. They may now care about things they could not once imagine. Wishes change as people do. Having everything we once wanted may still leave us wondering how we want to live now.

This makes me wonder whether what we have accomplished is enough to account for what we have lived.

I feel this particularly in music and dance. Before learning an instrument, I could mostly imagine playing a song I liked. Once I began, I gradually heard relationships among rhythm, musical parts, and tone. Another way of playing could give the same song another meaning. In dance, I initially noticed the steps. Later, I began to see how a body moves and how two people establish a connection. There were things within an apparently familiar activity that I had not known how to notice.

There is still much I cannot do. But beginning these activities has made more of the world available to my hearing, sight, and feeling. Some interests reveal why they are interesting only after we enter them. From outside, I could not even formulate the questions waiting within.

Perhaps this is where the open field lies. It need not require a journey somewhere far away. It can exist inside a familiar song, a movement I practice every day, or a subject that becomes less straightforward the more I think about it. Moving a little farther changes the world before me. It also changes the person able to perceive that world. Returning to the same place, I may find that the view has changed.

Of course, a life ends. Time and energy have limits. I cannot learn every instrument, dance every dance well, or understand every question. Choosing one direction leaves others unexplored. If an open field meant an obligation to cover all of it, its expansiveness would become an impossible burden.

What feels boundless to me is the impossibility of drawing a line in advance and saying that nothing beyond it could be worth experiencing. Leaving much unexplored does not take meaning away from the ground we have crossed. A person can live deeply within a small corner of the field. They can also stop for a while. There is room for these different ways of moving through it.

That is also what I mean when I say that growth has no final endpoint. We often associate growth with greater skill, greater excellence, or becoming more like an ideal version of ourselves. But living can also change our judgments, loosen our certainties, and teach us our limits. One person travels farther; another comes to understand that they no longer need to keep chasing. Some changes cannot yet be called gains or losses, although they have already become part of the person.