We celebrated labor day weekend here in the U.S. with performances of the 2016 movie La La Land.

I was many years out of school when the film came out in 2016, and within seconds of the opening scene, I was transported straight back to being a student in Los Angeles (at the pier in Santa Monica, having sushi at A-Float in Pasadena, practicing under the oak tree on the music campus). I'd done time at both UCLA and USC, back when life was more about the idea of who I wanted to become than who I actually was. The palm-lined, sun-drenched city was my dreamland, a place that held a future with so much promise and possibility.

In the movie, jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and aspiring actor Mia (Emma Stone) are the players in a love story, which is, in equal parts a love letter to LA and ode to dreamers. (People like you, my dears, reaching into the depths of your soul to make something beautiful in a sometimes wretched world. But I digress).

This time I was ready for the music, both nostalgic and hopeful, but what I wasn't ready for was a look in my own rearview mirror, at the life I dreamed of back then next to the life I'm actually living now.

And you know what I wish I'd known in those LA years? It can be dang hard to see your own life while you're living it. More on that in a second.

In the film we see Sebastian, who knows exactly what jazz is supposed to sound like, and won't play anything less, even when it costs him the gig. But he takes a job playing music he doesn't even like, in a band that he can’t stand, because it pays enough to eventually open the club he actually dreams of building.

Mia does the opposite. She goes to audition after audition, gets a callback, gets told no, waits tables. She writes and performs a one-woman play. Almost nobody comes.

They both want the same thing: a life built around what they love. But they go after it in almost opposite ways. From inside their own tangled view of things, it looks like Sebastian sells out, giving up on the real thing. And for Mia, it seems like her show flopping is the cue to quit, proof that she should give it up and go home.

In retrospect, Sebastian taking the job he hated was actually a bridge, allowing him to build the club he’s always wanted to build. And Mia’s failure is the thing that opens the door to the life she wanted, because there happened to be one person in that audience, a casting director who loved her performance enough to give her an opportunity.

So watching the movie again from stage, I have to call out (yet another) thing school doesn’t teach or prepare you for: That there’s no way you can tell the difference between a detour and a dead end while you're standing in it.

Nobody warns you about it. The wedding gig you're tired of playing, a teaching schedule that eats your practice time, or yet another audition that doesn't go your way. What looks like a dead end is usually a redirection, a bridge, or a door, and you won't know which until you're much further down the road, looking back.

I didn't know, all those years ago, that the life that would unfold for me wouldn't look anything like the one I was picturing, and that all this wouldn't be a failure.

We treat "the dream" like a fixed photograph, waiting for us somewhere out ahead, exactly as we pictured it. But nobody's path looks like a still image. Not Sebastian's, not Mia's, not mine, not yours either. Success usually shows up sideways, in a disguise as the gig you didn't want, or the masterclass, the talk, the show nobody came to. It can feel like years of standing still.

Knowing this, maybe the truth isn't complicated at all.

The path is the path. Wherever you go, there you are, doing the unglamorous thing, showing up as yourself inside it. The present moment is the only place any of this actually happens. The rest reveals itself later, the way it always does.

At the end, Mia and Sebastian find themselves in the same room again, sharing a moment of what could've been, with a dream sequence of a different path lived out. There's a look, a smile and small nod that holds gratitude instead of regret. Recognition of the path each one helped the other find.

Cheering for you,
Ixi

P.S. What's a thing in your life right now that feels like standing still, but might actually be the bridge? Conversely, what's something you can give a nod to, as you look back on where you've come? Reply and tell me, I read every one!

P.P.S. If taking stock like this is calling to you, that's the whole spirit behind this season's Harvest collection, small group writing and career practices built around exactly this kind of looking back before we move into what's next. It's live now, here.

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