Connecting Dots - Part 1

I'm very much a believer in a concept that others may put less faith in: that everything happens for a reason.

If I go back to important life choices I've made, particularly since high school, I can see how those choices appear to have been utterly necessary to get where I am today. This way of thinking has long influenced my own understanding of how I met my wife, who is Korean. If I connect enough dots, I end up back at high school in Wiarton, Ontario.

It started off when I became good friends with a guy named Terry. We met in the summer of 1985 while playing ball together, and we went on to become best friends within the next couple of years while attending high school. It just so happened that his dad, Ernie, was the principal of the school. Ernie was a fine educator, and an even better human being who made me feel welcome in his home whenever I visited Terry. So in late 1989, when it came time to apply for college or university, and I had chosen broadcasting school, Ernie took me aside and recommended going to university to get a degree instead. But not just any university. He recommended the University of Guelph, where Terry was going to go. For some reason, I capitulated and accepted Guelph's offer of admission early in 1990. This would be the first dot connecting to my wife.

While at U of G, where Terry and I roomed together in our first year in residence, I met a guy named Kenn. He was an animal science major, or an Aggie. Terry and I became great friends with Kenn, going on road trips to Cooperstown, New York, and Chicago, Illinois. I also had the good fortune of attending two Aggie-sponsored trips thanks to my friendship with Kenn. On the second of those trips (to New York City), I met this girl named Miriam, who was a classmate of Kenn's. Miriam and I began dating early in 1995. This was the second dot.

My relationship with Miriam wasn't destined to last very long. I already had plans of going overseas for a year, and Miriam wasn't interested in following me at the time. Nevertheless, there was a stroke of good fortune involved -- for me, at least. I had committed to going to Korea to teach, and Miriam just happened to have two friends teaching at a school in Seoul. Through Miriam's friends, I was able to sign a contract with Universal Language Institute. This was the third dot.

Why? Because in the same month that I began teaching at ULI, a young college student with the English name Heather began taking English classes at ULI. Before the end of 1995, Heather and I began dating, and we soon recognized a great similarity in our personalities and interests. Of course, we eventually got married. I still believe that it was always my cosmic mission to find Heather, and neither one of us can imagine being married to anyone else. All those important life choices I made brought me to her.

These are the dots I have connected with the benefit of hindsight. And one might ask, what's the purpose of writing about this?

I've just finished reading a chapter of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, in which he talks about what it will take for people in the 21st century to compete in a globalized society. In one section about teaching liberal arts in schools, he quotes Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. Jobs tells how he dropped out of college after six months because the classes were not stimulating enough. However, he continued to "drop in" on courses that he thought sounded interesting. One course was about calligraphy. He explains how learning about fonts and spacing in the calligraphy course may have seemed like a perfectly innocuous way to spend time. But ten years later, when he and Steve Wozniak were developing the first Macintosh computer, Jobs brought that experience in the calligraphy class to the design of the computer's graphical interface -- and changed the history of the personal computer forever.

Jobs goes on to say, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." (Friedman, p.318)

This idea is important to me for two reasons at this time. First, I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few months mentally dissecting my choice two years ago to attend Vancouver Film School, only to find myself immediately after graduation getting back into teaching. Was that choice wise? So far, it seems to have done nothing more than bankrupt me, with no likelihood that I will gain from the choice I made to study screenwriting.

The second reason relates to the bigger idea that Friedman argues in this chapter, which is that we need liberal arts in the education system. As someone planning to become a history teacher at the high school level, I find myself wondering how to explain the need for such programs when so many people say we need to focus on math and science.

With these two reasons in mind, I will explore them in my next post... for this one has gotten way too long.