Mary Catherine Bateson’s words of confidence for college students uncertain about their futures

    Underneath this Saunterer’s years was a continuous commitment to creating goodness in work. This thread produced on the surface an unpredictable zigzag course - degrees in engineering, working at Westinghouse Electric, a teaching and research position in forestry, training in physics, biostatistics, philosophy and the arts. That’s how life is really lived, which is the point Mary Catherine Bateson makes:

A lot of young people have a great difficulty committing themselves to a relationship or to a career because of the feeling that once they do, they’re trapped for a long, long time. On the other hand, they feel they’ve got to get on the right “track” because, after all, this is a long and terrifying commitment. I think it is very liberating for college students when an older person says to them, “Your first job after college need not be the beginning of an ascending curve that’s going to take you through your life. It can be a zigzag. You might be doing something different in five years.” That’s something that young people need to hear: that the continuous story, where the whole of a person’s life is prefigured very early on, is a cultural creation, not a reflection of life as it is really lived.

    (Quoted from “Composing a Life Story,” chapter 27, page 213 in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, edited by P. R. Loeb. Basic Books. 2004.)
    For a brief biography of Mary Catherine Bateson, click here. For images of and relating to Mary Catherine Bateson, click here.

Comments

[Michaela Stuver]

Thanks for the link to this. I've heard that before, and I'm grateful for those who have helped me see I'm not "stuck" in one decision for the rest of my life.