Vectors

Vector - noun - A quantity possessing both magnitude and direction.
I just finished a book called Again to Carthage by John L. Parker, Jr. It's the very awaited sequel to his book Once a Runner. Both books are about running. Both are fantastic. Both are worth reading even if you've never run a step in your life. It's the second book, Again to Carthage, that has set me thinking.
In the book our hero has followed a semi successful olympic bid with a semi successful, though mundane, life. He seeks some sort of redemption through attempting to make the olympic team one last time. The author beautifully lays out the torturous thought processes that lead our runner on this path, but it all boils down to direction. In his post olympic life he doesn't have anything in his life that is moving definitively forward. He's wallowing. He craves the simplicity of working to run better. Of training for a certain goal and being able to measure whether you are coming closer to that goal. A life where everything can be boiled down to one simple thing. Are you getting faster?
The author uses an arrow for reference. Life as an arrow pointing toward something. When you know where it's pointing and that you are headed that way satisfaction is easy. He never uses the term vector, but I suspect that's really what he meant. A life where you are moving a given direction with a magnitude that you can measure. When thinking about this I initially thought it had profound implications for life. The more I thought about it though, the more I thought that it has even greater implications for parenting.
It's easy to get lost when you're an adult. It's easy to find yourself just wallowing around in life for a few decades after college, or even longer. You just do things and grow old. Pretty much everyone once thought they'd be rich and famous somehow and it's a little disheartening to realize that at best your life is pretty average. Like I said, wallowing.
Not when you're a kid though. When you're a kid it's all possibility and movement. From the very beginning, the first day, your'e getting better. You see better. You move better. You grow. Soon crawling and talking and eating and all of that wonderful baby stuff. This is progress. Real measurable progress. Any parenting book will tell you where your baby should be at a certain age. When should they walk? When should they have 10 words? When should they recognize letters? Progress that is measured by parents and pediatricians to make sure that the vector of life has both the magnitude and direction that it should. All healthy children have this vector, and it's fantastic.
It's not so simple for our whole lives though, and I'm not just talking about middle aged wallowing. Take a look inside any county jail and think about the life vectors involved. Even more startling perhaps, look inside a juvenile detention facility. These are still kids. Young adults maybe, but arguably children. Once they were laying down on a floor and rolled over for the first time. They spoke their first words. They were measured and plotted on a growth chart and it was decided that they were doing fine. Somewhere something happened, and I think this is one of the things that parents fear most. That vector that was always pointing forward somehow turned, or reversed. A life that was supposed to be getting better and better for some reason didn't.
I'll pick this post up next week.