“Jack of all trades, master of none,” a colleague said to me the other week. I have heard this phrase a hundred times, and rarely thought much of it, but this time it really bothered me. I found it creeping into my thoughts at odd hours, repeating itself over and over and over as insights waiting to be seen will do. Niggling at me until I realized why it was getting to me: it takes the fun out of everything.
I guess the statement is true from a time point of view: if you spend all your time trying to be good at everything, you will be great at nothing, because there simply isn’t enough time. And we all want to be great at something, don’t we? But I find it ludicrously limiting, so I cannot accept it.
I love the organic nature of life. I love starting a project just to be pointed off into another one on a different subject. Reading three totally different books at once makes me happy – one on swimming, one on dreams, and one on quantum mechanics, for example. Taking a class or a workshop simply because it speaks to a part of me, not because it specifically adds to my chosen profession is fantastic. I love learning a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Studying enough to create a relationship with the world from a different point of view and then moving on to the next thing.
This is life. This is life the only way I have ever known or seen happiness in myself and others. Life is not linear and plodding progress towards greatness. As Westerners we struggle deeply with this – and I am no exception – because we love to pretend that our certain kind of order and rule are safe and easy. Reality is that even in the organic appearance of things, there is extreme order. Our universe operates on strict laws that work EVERY time (it is almost annoying when you are in the habit of doing things wrong) but they aren’t necessarily OUR ideas of strict laws.
I think, actually, that following the little paths, the little sidesteps, in life does the opposite of what the beginning statement implies. Instead of learning nothing well, being a jack of all trades extends your knowledge, and your empathy, and it cannot help but deepen your mastery of the one true thing we are here to do: learn life’s lessons, learn them truly and well.
I do not want to know life from the view of one window, no matter how large that window is. I want to know life from every mountaintop I can climb and every creature that will carry me high.
