“I knew I wasn’t the same Caster. I was still nursing my injured leg and I was grossly overweight, but all I needed was a chance. The director offered me a three-year scholarship. I would study sports science. Soon after, I met with Jean in person. Even seeing how out of shape I was, he believed in me. Potch was about 180 kilometers away from Pretoria. Violet wasn’t happy about the distance, but I would no longer be sitting.

According to the professor of history Sidney R. Bland, Alice Paul told him that Burns was “never quite as committed as we’d like”— an astounding statement that says more about Paul than it does about Burns, given that Burns also endured hunger strikes and torturous force-feedings. According to Professor Bland, “Lucy Burns was the first of the ‘silent sentinels’ to be incarcerated; she spent more time in jail than any American suffragist.”

Lucy Burns never wanted to live a purely monomaniacal life like Alice Paul’s, but that does not mean she lacked fire or focus. Alice Paul didn’t appear to have much of anything else in her life than her work for women’s rights because, the evidence leads me to conclude, she didn’t feel the need for much of anything else in her life. Lucy Burns, in contrast, did feel the need for other aspects of her life. That Paul focused nearly 100% of her fire on the fight for suffrage and women’s rights doesn’t make her a more worthy template to follow. Lucy Burns also focused her fire during the fight for suffrage, just not in the purely monomaniacal manner of Alice Paul.

7. Fog

Micheal J. Fox and Maurice White emerged on the other side of the fog in very different places because they were very different people with different encodings and different answers to the question of what fed the inner fire. White would have likely been both unhappy and ineffective if he’d tried to do what Fox did, just as Fox would have been unhappy and ineffective trying to do what White did. On the last day of his life, not long after his 74th birthday, White and the writer Herb Powell talked, as they did often while collaborating on White’s compelling and revealing memoir, My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire.

As you’re wondering through the fog, you use the compass as you take a series of iterative steps toward having all three elements come together into One Big Thing.

And that is a key phrase: “iterative steps.”

The people in this study surprised me with the extent to which their lives were so often unplanned. Their lives were organic, unfolding, iterative, adaptive. They were like explorers adventuring into a vast unmapped territory, making discoveries and adapting a to whatever they hit along the way. Culling through tens of thousands of documents on the people in this study, I was continually struck by how their lives went down paths and ended up in places that they never expected. The path out of the fog lies in a series of small steps, a highly iterative, often unplanned approach that I think of as simplex stepping through life. And it is to this idea of simplex stepping that we now turn.

I also take solace from Franklin’s life, in learning that he endured an extended trough in his 50s and 60s (relative to the rest of his life). If Benjamin Franklin can make mistakes and misjudgments, then I don’t feel so bad about my own mistakes and misjudgments. If Benjamin Franklin can spend years on efforts that ultimately ended in failure, then I don’t feel so bad about my own efforts on projects that ended up being dead ends or cul-de-sacs. If Benjamin Franklin can feel dispirited and in a fog funk, then I don’t feel so bad about my own existential fog funks. If Benjamin Franklin can enter his 60s with half of the most significant pages of his life yet to be written, then I feel quite good about the possibilities for the late decades of life.

In writing about Benjamin Franklin and casting back through all the remarkable people in this investigation, I’m struck by the imperfections in their lives. The stories led me to a gigantic, calming exhale about my own life imperfections, letting go the anchoring weight of past mistakes and missed opportunities. I take from studying them a reminder that I wrote for myself and that I return to whenever I find myself being pulled around backward in the saddle by past regrets: You cannot straighten out the road behind you.