latitude

I have circled this question for a long time. It’s the kind of question you feel before you find the right words for it.

We usually answer it with character. One of them was braver, or simply wanted it more. But when I look closely at the actual moments, that is almost never what I find. What I find is that the opportunity did not arrive to two blank slates. It arrived to two lives already in motion, each holding a different weight and a different amount of room to move. The same offer, made to two people, is not the same offer. It costs each of them something different, and sometimes it costs one of them everything.

That is what I am studying. Not the choices people make, exactly, but the conditions those choices are made inside. The parent who could not move because a child was partway through something that could not be interrupted. The person who stayed in a job long past wanting it, because leaving meant losing the one steady thing. The chance that came a decade too late, or on the same morning everything else fell apart.

I have come to call it latitude, because the word already holds what I mean. Latitude is a fixed coordinate, the position you were born into and did not choose. And it is room, the leeway a life gives you to act. Every moment is an encounter between the two, between the conditions you inherited and the possibilities rising in front of you. What it costs to meet a moment, and how much room you had to meet it with, is rarely the same for any two people. That difference is not luck, and it is not character. It has a shape, and I am trying to trace it.

I am talking with people about one such moment in their own lives. A time when the timing of something changed what they could do about it. It doesn’t matter whether it worked out or fell apart, or never resolved at all. It does not matter whether you chose it or it happened to you. You do not need to have made sense of it already. If a moment in your life was priced by its timing, I would like to understand it.

It is one private conversation, usually about an hour. There is nothing to prepare. Your name stays out of the book and anything that comes from it, and you can stop at any point. I will mostly listen.

If that is you, you can reach me at corri@aretestrategic.com.

And if you are simply curious where this is going, you are welcome to follow along as it takes shape.