There is a particular embarrassment in being ambitious without a diagram. You can admit to wanting things if the wanting has a respectable shape: a title, a five-year plan, a sequence of sensible promotions. It is harder to say that you want to make buildings, write books, build software, edit a magazine, learn how a camera works, and possibly disappear for six months to study the history of a chair. The list sounds less like a vocation than a person leaving several shops without buying anything.
“The work is to stay near the things that make you curious.”
I do not mean that I want every job in the world. I mean that I keep seeing doors. An architect draws a stair with such confidence that I want to draw stairs. A designer explains why a lamp is slightly too low and suddenly I want to spend the afternoon measuring lamps. I read a good piece of writing and want to write. I use a well-made website and want to make one. A technology that quietly removes an irritation from someone’s day can seem more beautiful to me than a grand gesture.
For a while I treated this as a character flaw. Surely a serious person chose a field, bought the correct notebooks, and stayed there long enough to be recognized by the field. I watched people introduce themselves with one clean noun and felt both admiration and suspicion. Architect. Founder. Writer. Photographer. My own nouns kept changing places on the table.
The pressure to have a plan is not entirely external. I have asked myself for one with the sternness of a manager. Where will this be in five years? What is the business model? Which skill is the central skill? What are you building? The questions are reasonable in the way a chair is reasonable: useful, necessary, and capable of making a room look less strange. They become less reasonable when they are asked before the material has arrived.
Some of my plans have been very serious for three days. I have opened a document for a book, a folder for a film, a spreadsheet for a small object, and a page of notes about a place I have not visited. The first hours are glorious because the idea has not yet encountered administration. There are no permissions, revisions, invoices, or moments when the work looks like a badly folded napkin. Then something else catches my eye and the old idea becomes a room I have left the lights on in.
This is where the difference between lost and curious becomes useful. Lost is not knowing where to go and wanting an authority to point. Curious is not knowing where to go because the room keeps producing interesting doors. They feel similar from the outside. Both can involve too many tabs and a notebook full of arrows. Curiosity has a pulse. Being lost mostly asks for a timetable.
I do have taste, which is not the same as a plan but is sometimes a better instrument. I know when a sentence has been overexplained. I know I prefer a room with one awkward object to a room that has achieved harmony. I know the difference between a website that wants to be admired and one that wants to be entered. Taste does not tell me what to do next. It tells me what not to carry into the next room.
The shame of not knowing is partly the shame of being visible while you are still assembling yourself. A finished identity is easier to photograph. An unfinished one has cables in it. It has a page with the wrong title, a course abandoned in week four, and a drawing that is better from a distance. I am not asking uncertainty to become admirable. Some of it is simply disorganized. Some of it wastes time. Some of it is an excuse.
Still, I would rather be honestly uncertain than certain about a life I have only chosen because it photographs well. This is not a brave conclusion. It is a working condition. Tonight there is an open document, an unfinished sentence, and a plan that has not survived contact with the evening. I am not sure what I am doing. I am sure I want to keep looking.