The Wineglass


A wineglass starts broad at the base, then slims right down to a narrow pinch for quite a way, then swells out again. I have thought of the wineglass as a model of someone’s personal CV, in this way.

From the day you are born, your parents may start to appraise you according to some norm they hold, such as developmental ‘milestones’ or what your siblings or cousins or neighbours’ children were thought to be like at that age. A child should be potty-trained by six months or walking by two years, or composing sonatas by four, or whatever it is. Fortunately, you have no idea whatsoever of what they’re thinking – it goes straight over your head. So as an infant you are still subjectively free (although you don’t know that either).

When you start school, it becomes explicit: tests, SATs, the curriculum. Your performance is measured and compared to that of other children in your age group. There are statistics. You may even have your IQ measured. You can ‘pass’ or ‘fail’. This is a closed system of thinking. It stays like that for many years, the narrowing of options and outlook, the stem of the wineglass. For some, this may last life long as a world view, and they may always want to know, ‘How am I doing?’ For others, there may be a blossoming of freedom in their 20s or 30s, when they realise that they themselves can decide what they are going to do with their lives – the widening out of the wineglass. I think that if you are out into the wider part of the wineglass, you can be curriculum-free, and you don’t have to compare yourself so much to other people.

I don’t believe that life is a closed system. If life is a jigsaw puzzle, not only are we not sure that we have got all the pieces; not only can we not always find the corners or many of the edges; not only has someone hidden the box lid, so we can’t see the picture, I also suspect that some of the pieces are two-sided, front and back; some are three-dimensional. And I suspect that some are quite squidgy or morphic, and change their shape over night.

Since the jigsaw puzzle is so incredibly complex, we owe it to our fellow human beings to be compassionate with everyone’s fumbling attempts to make sense of any of it, don’t we?