Peripheral Visions

learned to name.
    In my recent work on the ways women combine commitments to career and family, I have been struck by how commonly women zigzag from stage to stage without a long-term plan, improvising along the way, building the future from “something old and something new.” For men and women, résumés full of change show resiliency and creativity, the strength to welcome new learning, yet personnel directors often discriminate against anyone whose résumé does not show a clear progression. Quite a common question in job interviews is “What do you want to be doing in five years?” “Something I cannot now imagine” is not yet a winning answer. Accepting that logic, young people worry about getting “on track,” yet their years of experimentation and short-term jobs are becoming longer. If only to offer an alternative, we need to tell the other stories, the stories of shifting identities and interrupted paths, and to celebrate the triumphs of adaptation.
    Recently I have been experimenting with asking adults to work with multiple interpretations of their life histories by composing two brief narratives, one focused on continuity, the other on discontinuity. “Everything I have ever done has been heading me for where I am today” is one version of the truth, but most adults can say as well, “It is only after many surprises and choices, interruptions and disappointments, that I have arrived somewhere I could never have anticipated.” Most people have a preference, one way or the other, a version that is normally in focus for them, underlying and justifying their current choices, but almost everyone can discover the alternative version. Some solve the problem I have set them by focusing on different aspects of their lives: same spouse, different job; same job, different city. Some notice that the appearance of discontinuity is increased or reduced by the choice of words, so they can make the contrast by saying, “I have always been a writer” and “I used to write poetry, but now I am a journalist.” A friend pointed out to me during a period when I was complaining of the discontinuities in my own life that although I had changed my major activity repeatedly, I had always shifted not to something new but to something prefigured peripherally, an earlier minor theme, so that discontinuity was an illusion created by too narrow a focus and continuity came from a diverse fabric and a broader vision.
    Continuity and discontinuity are not mutually exclusive. “Wherever I go it’s important to me to work with new people.” “I have always enjoyed tackling the unknown.” “I have always wanted my work to provide new challenges.” Some offer metaphors of continuous variation, like surfing, a life of encountering one wave after another. Some say, after years in the same profession or setting, that life is filled with wonder because each day is different. One person wrote, “After all, the laws of physics never change,” but, in the words of another, “Sure, I’ve had the same job for thirty years, but meanwhile consider the turnover in my body’s cells.” All these approaches can be part of the same repertoire, for these are not exclusive truths. Tales of both continuity and discontinuity can be constructed from the same “facts,” the dates and names and addresses of any life history. There is no single true interpretation that must be discovered and held to—on the contrary, each of these interpretations offers a different kind of strength and flexibility for fitting into a society of multiple systems of meaning.
    Some dimension of continuity is essential to make change in other dimensions bearable. The evolution of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company into the modern A&P is said to have depended on affirming that the company had been and would continue to be a food company. When I was an infant, my mother ruled that it was all right to leave the baby in a strange place with a familiar person, or in a familiar place with a strange person, but too frightening if both were strange. Through most of my childhood, the sense of home was constant, but great numbers of people moved through the household. When Vanni was a child my husband and I moved frequently, but she had a much smaller number of caretakers than I did. Even today, after all those moves, Vanni worries about maintaining friendships across distance—a compensation for disruption? Or a learned appreciation of the value of