Most people spend a very long time measuring their lives in one direction only. Further along. More completed, more acquired, more reached, more finished. That is the direction everything gets counted in, and somebody can be doing well in it by any standard anybody applies, and it never once occurs to them that a life has other directions available to it.
A corridor can be extremely long. It can be the longest corridor anybody has ever built and people can come to admire it. It is still a corridor. And the whole time somebody is walking down it, the sky is outside, and there is no wall preventing them from going out. There is simply no reason to, because excellent progress is being made and everybody says so.
That is the closest anybody can get to describing what eventually gets found. Not that the life was wrong, because it was not wrong and most of it would not be undone. That it was narrow, in a way that nothing inside it could possibly report, because narrowness does not show up in any of the measurements we take.
The direction that is counted
Length is what gets counted. How far along, at what age, compared with whom, and whether the rate is improving. Everything from school onwards is arranged around this single axis, and it produces very capable people who can say precisely where they are at any moment and how they are doing relative to expectation.
Width gets counted a little. How many things somebody has tried, how many places they have been, how much variety is in the account. It is admired at parties and it is not taken seriously by anybody. Depth is not counted at all, because nobody has yet found a way to count it, and what cannot be counted does not appear in any account of how a life is going.
So a person can be exemplary along one axis and entirely undeveloped along another and receive nothing but confirmation for forty years. There is no signal anywhere in the system. That is what makes it possible to go so extraordinarily far without ever noticing what is missing.
What depth actually is
The word is used constantly and usually means very little, so it is worth trying to say what it means here. Depth is not seriousness and it is not intelligence, and some of the deepest people anybody meets are not particularly either of those and would not describe themselves that way.
It is closer to how much of a thing somebody is actually in contact with. Two people can attend the same hour, in the same room, with the same people. One passes through it and could not describe it afterwards. The other is in it completely, and something in that hour reaches them that the first one never came near. It was the same hour. The entire difference is on the inside.
Which means depth is not somewhere else and does not require a different life or different circumstances or a quieter year. It is available in whatever is already happening, right now, in the ordinary afternoon. This is either very good news or very annoying news, depending on the day and on how much was resting on circumstances being the obstacle.
The sky was always outside
The part that takes longest is accepting that nothing was withheld by anybody. There is an assumption that there must be some gate somewhere, some entry requirement, some circumstance not yet reached that would eventually permit this other kind of living.
There was no gate. It was available every single one of those years, on every one of those days, while everybody was busy. The moving was too fast to notice, and the moving was not forced by anybody, and there is nobody at all to hold responsible for the decades.
How much of a life is meant to be spent in each direction is not known, and whether meant is even the right word for any of it is not known either. What is known is that one of them gets everything and the others almost nothing, and that anybody who finally goes outside finds that the corridor never had a roof on it at all.
