My life has been like a broken pot

 

A pit-fired pot given to me by Dwight Graves*

I’ve always admired people who discovered their true purpose in life as teenagers, pushed through to achieve their goal despite all obstacles, and ended up with a fulfilling career. That’s not me.

My sense of purpose as a high school senior was directed toward escaping the confines of rural NH. I wanted to study psychology after reading Sigmund Freud. I was lucky enough to be accepted at Columbia in the heart of the Big Apple.

I had to work hard to catch up with my classmates, many of whom had attended prestigious private schools. Between studying a lot and being shy, I felt lonely. But worse, my excitement about psychology was soon extinguished because Columbia’s psychology department was fixated on hard science: stimulus and response as measured by experiments with white rats in Skinner boxes.

Rather than showing grit, I waved the white flag, gave up, and dropped out during my third semester. Rudderless and, partly as an olive branch to my disappointed father, I joined the Navy, which had been a valued part of his life. For the next three years, I learned a lot about human nature and small-group psychology while cruising the rivers of Vietnam and raising hell in bars across the Far East. 

After the Navy, I enrolled at UNH. I soon found a new, compelling purpose in life after taking courses with Professor Bobick, who had an exquisite grasp of sociology in its philosophical (starting with Homer) and literary roots. He wrote me a recommendation stating I was one of his most promising students.

 I chose a graduate program with generous tuition assistance, despite its orientation not being a good fit for me. Spending long, sedentary hours in sterile classrooms, I felt trapped like a frisky puppy perpetually confined to a timeout cage. 

I tried twice and dropped out each time. Because my sense of purpose was again lacking, I found myself thrown out into the real world without an occupation. 

Almost by accident, I ended up working as a self-employed mason building dry-laid stone walls, a skill I picked up during summer jobs in construction. I enjoyed doing hard physical labor, sweating under the hot sun. I loved being my own boss, which was an important discovery. As a bonus, I enjoyed the artistic side of doing high-end stone work.

My original plan was to earn enough money building walls during the summer to take the winter off and write. But I ended up writing very little, once again, because of a lack of clear purpose. After a decade of this routine, my creative self felt cramped. Still, out of inertia, I soldiered on for another 10 years until my joy of working bareback under the hot sun took its toll, resulting in three different skin cancers.

Seeking a change, I hoped a Master’s Degree would help me get published as a freelance writer, so I applied to Antioch Graduate School in Keene, returning once again to psychology. This time, the program was not about helping people, not manipulating white rats. 

 As I was still working as a stone mason, the grind was relentless. Many times I was tempted to drop out, but paying back 26K without a degree for a soon-to-be 50-year-old divorced man was too much to contemplate.

As it turned out, I thrived as a therapist. Working at my first job with combat veterans with  PTSD at Vet Centers gave my life meaning, along with an unbreakable sense of obligation. I took my responsibility seriously, going to bed early with no excess partying. I learned work habits that have since then held me in good stead.

Then I transitioned to the civilian world, working as a therapist at a Community Health Center, and then moving on to private practice before mostly retiring in 2021.  With more free time, during this transition, I found myself devoting more time to photography and writing.

Since the 1980s, I have done some writing: a few freelance pieces and occasional columns for the Concord Monitor, sometimes as a member of the Monitor Board of Contributors. In retirement, I decided to challenge myself by trying to write a column every week for the Monitor. I wanted to see if I had anything to say and, if I did, whether the Monitor would publish it. 

So far, they have. 

Writing here today about the many twists and turns in my life has given me a key insight: While a few folks may develop a long, lasting sense of purpose, most don’t. And I’m one of them. Rather than a single clear purpose, mine has meandered and shifted course due to the slings and arrows of life.

My sense of purpose is more like kintsugi, a Japanese art form where broken pottery is glued back together and then the cracks are dusted with gold. Instead of disguising the damage, kintsugi highlights the breaks, transforming them into unique and beautiful features. 

This practice is not just about repairing objects; it embodies a philosophical approach that embraces imperfection and the beauty of a repaired object's history. 

That’s the way we should all think about our lives.

xxx

* Dwight Graves was a well-known local potter from Warner, a peace activist, musician, Vietnam vet, and NH “Educator of the Year”