Compass and Candle
Compass and Candle.
With only one, you miss what you can see with the other.
I started out as a kid reading books and writing stories. I always thought that this wasn’t really a path to a career, but rather that the skills used in understanding dense texts and producing original, argumentative analyses would come in handy across a wide range of fields. I still won’t disagree entirely with this, I guess. At some point towards the end of high school and into college, I made a pivot into the sciences, thinking that the path forward would always be quantitative, and the time spent lost in novels and poetry would just be fond memories.
I went about as far as you can go, completing a B.S., Ph.D., and post-doctoral research in neuroscience, up to submitting an application for a tenure-track faculty position abroad and then deciding not to send out any more.
It wasn’t until I opted-out of the academic system that I regained the freedom to pursue non-specific interests, including within the sciences, as I did prior to specializing. This wasn’t an intentional turn; I just found myself having more time to think productively without worrying about applying for the next round of funding, or how hypothetical peer reviewers would respond to my next journal submission. I won’t carry on about this burn-out, as I have nothing new to bring, except for maybe one observation.
When you dedicate your working focus to a single, highly-narrow topic, you reach the limit of not just what you know about it, but what the world knows about it. It’s a unique feeling, and it’s not something you reach in effort; it suddenly hits you one day, after you’ve pored over the same sources again and again, repeated the same conversations with your colleagues– who also know as much as you do– and you realize… you have no more questions. All of your wonder is already out there, unanswered, waiting to be tested and studied. This is the dream, isn’t it, when your research topic feels so wide open, that any result would be a breakthrough?
For many people– and rightfully so– this is the goal. This means you’ve struck gold, and your path forward will be here, digging each year a little deeper, building a little higher, constructing a new edifice of knowledge from what was previously scattered gravel. For me, though, it wasn’t the feeling I was looking for. I didn’t think that pushing further would really have produced the results I needed. I may be alone in this, or maybe not, which is why I’m writing and sharing this. Rather than feeling free, I instead felt trapped. I didn’t put all this time into this one specific topic to become an expert on it, and only it: I had wanted to emerge wiser in the end, with a broader and sharper perspective, where answering this one question would allow me to answer other, seemingly unrelated questions with a fresh mind.
That’s not to say that those perspective wouldn’t be possible, or that this effort didn’t already yield such insights. It did. I just realized that as a way in life, this wasn’t what I wanted.
I think that I had used the compass to travel as far as I could go, to the edge of the map and maybe a little beyond, guided by the precise sensing of the external magnetic field that never erred. It’s amazing, really, where we can go with such technology; only birds seem to do better on their own. I would never want to get rid of my compass. It’s just that, when I got back home, and took out my candle, I saw a world that I’d realized I’d neglected, a world that wasn’t always clear in the corners and sometimes mislead me, but it was a world that felt familiar, and a world that never seemed like it would finish.
I learned a lot with my compass. And I’m back to learning with my candle again, too. It feels nice to spark some warmth.
Your readership is more than enough. Still, if you’d like to buy me a coffee, it’s the clearest signal to keep writing.