I've noticed how we tend to make sense of our careers by looking backwards. We pick out the decisions that mattered and build a story around how one experience led to the next. A first job becomes the reason we found a better one, a difficult manager becomes a lesson in leadership, and even a disappointment eventually looks as though it led us toward an opportunity we couldn't have anticipated. From a sufficient distance, even the mistakes begin to look like necessary parts of a sensible progression. That story can be reassuring, but I think it can also be misleading. It gives our lives an order they rarely seem to possess while we're actually living them. More importantly, it assumes that time moves through us in a neat sequence, with the past producing the present and the present gradually constructing a future that doesn't yet exist. That's certainly how we experience a calendar. I'm not convinced it's the only useful way to understand a life.
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