Serial. One story told week by week. It's a phenomenon. As with most phenomenon's I came late to the party. My wife and I were driving first to Springfield, Missouri where our daughter was playing in a holiday basketball tournament (they finished in second place) and then driving home on New Years Eve. That's about sixteen hours of driving, round trip. This turned out to be the perfect setting for binge listening to all 12 Episodes of the "This American Life" podcast "Serial".
It passed the time and it was interesting. And it's one of those things that you find yourself thinking about after the fact and applying in a variety of situations. While ruminating over the arrival of 2015 and my combination of lack of any giant resolutions, yet giddiness with a brand new year awash with possibilities I found myself comparing the moment to...Serial.
Serial begins with a lot of energy. There's this guy who is in prison. Maybe he shouldn't be. Enter intrepid radio reporter with curiosity and a desire to see what actually happened. Her approach is straightforward - arrange the facts, check the timeline, review the accounts of the participants. Early on there is close attention paid to the timeline. If a certain window of time can be accounted for in some way the whole case goes away. Or so it seems. Until it just gets more rather than less confusing. By the time Serial hits its homestretch - it's final three or four episodes - it becomes clear that the facts are negotiable, that the timeline may not help all that much at all, and that we may be no closer to having any idea who to believe than we did when we began this project. As the weeks wind down, the focal point of the show, Adnan Syed, asks the narrator, Sarah Koenig, if her show will have an end. Meaning, how will this tie up? Will it just be finished or will there be some sort of outcome, conclusion, point made. She answers yes, that it will have an end. And it does. But it's not clean and there is much left in the balance. Which is not a criticism - just a reality.
And brings me back to January 1, 2015. That first day of the year is like the early days of Serial. Perhaps things have gotten out of control in some part of our lives. They aren't what we want them to be. We wish to do better. We need to make resolutions. If we can just lay the facts out of what the problems are and get a good look at them, fix the timeline so to speak, get everything in order, 2015 will look dramatically different than everything that has come before it.
Perhaps. Maybe so. But more likely we discover in life, as we discover in Serial, that more days may bring more information, and more information may not bring more clarity. Those commitments we make in the pristine mint world of January 1, 2015 may create excitement, but know that the world will be introducing some variables we have not planned on as we've plotted our course. Life is thick. It just is. Like Serial it may be endlessly surprising, endlessly interesting, and seem imminently solvable.
Our lives are one story, told weekly, daily, hourly, minute by minute. The solutions to life's problems are crystal clear. Except when they are not. Always. Except when they are not.
