Robert Rowland Smith on Milestones

It’s arguable that life’s two greatest milestones, life and death, are both ones we don’t experience. The first because we’re not properly conscious; the second because we’re not properly conscious. You can’t experience your own death, by definition. Both being born and dying prove elusive, forcing us to infer things about them from watching others. Despite their importance, we know them only second hand.

The remaining milestones, by contrast, are intensely vivid. Losing your virginity, passing your driving test, taking an exam, getting married, getting divorced. What’s critical about such milestones is not just that they mark a rite of passage, but that they do so with such intensity. It’s hard to do any of them without noticing.

And if they’re so intense, it’s largely because they can’t be delegated. Only you can lose your own virginity, or pass your own driving test, meaning that a milestone marks an encounter with oneself. Think, say, of taking exams. If they’re a cause of such anxiety, it owes not least to the fact that when you stare at the exam questions you’re staring simultaneously deep inside yourself to see, in all its naked truth, just how much or how little knowledge you’ve acquired.

This self-reflexive quality might explain why milestones get seared into the brain and we end up dreaming about them for many years after. They are photographs of our soul, taken at a moment in time. In this, a milestone is a cousin of the epiphany, that moment of blinding insight that can lead to major change.

But most of life is not milestone or epiphany. Like warfare, it’s long periods of boredom interspersed with terror. Unless, that is, we develop precisely the capacity for self-reflexion to which both milestone and epiphany lead.

Robert Rowland Smith is author of Driving With Plato: The Meaning of Life’s Milestones (Profile, 2011). He is speaking at The School of Life on 6^th January 2011. To book a ticket or for further information please click here

Comments

[Polaganje Vozačkog Ispita]

That is true. When someone is checking his own progress, he is inevitable forced to look onto milestones.

[Pattaya Girls]

sadly I can remeber very little omy life prior to 21 and i'm only in my late 30s :-(

[Drew Byrne]

I remember a remark, or, maybe, a quote, made by somebody or other once, “When you realize that the memories you can have are ones you don’t want, then what you do to acquire them becomes of immense importance.” I don’t remember the exact quotation, or who said it was so; but that’s one for the books I think, one, perhaps of relevance here in commenting on this post… But how long will you remember that someone has mentioned it to you? And then, is it one of any relevance to you? That’s the question.