Finding the Path…Again

John Dewey, transaction, and the lives we are continually becoming

Recently, I walked into the science building of a local university and unexpectedly encountered an old friend. Not a person. A name. Prominently displayed on the wall was a quotation from John Dewey.

I don’t remember having any particular expectation when I entered the building. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be transported backward through several decades of my life. But seeing Dewey’s name there did exactly that.

Suddenly I was back in graduate school, studying a field of psychology that almost no one seems to remember anymore: transactional ecological psychology. It was an unusual graduate program, combining professional psychology with scientific study and drawing deeply from philosophy, psychology, ecology, and even physics. I had applied only to that program. It wasn’t simply a way to become a psychologist. It represented something I had wanted for myself much earlier: to become both psychologist and philosopher, and to build a life’s work that reflected a philosophy of life and a personally-aligned worldview.

At the heart of our studies were John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, particularly their work—Knowing and the Known. Their proposition was deceptively simple and, for me, profound.

The known cannot really be separated from the knowing of it. We are not spectators standing outside the world, observing it from some completely independent or objective vantage point. We are participants in it and change it with our observation of it. The observer cannot be separated from the observed.

Dewey’s broader philosophy treated experience as something active and transactional. We act upon our surroundings, our surroundings act upon us, and what emerges cannot be fully understood by separating the pieces and asking which one caused the other. Experience is an ongoing engagement between organism and environment, person and circumstance, self and world.

That idea resonated with another body of thought we were required to study: Einstein’s theory of relativity. The two are not the same theory, of course. One belongs primarily to philosophy and psychology and the other to physics. But both helped challenge an older picture of reality in which an independent observer could stand outside events and describe a world operating according to fixed, linear relationships.

There was something liberating in that. The world was not simply a collection of objects bumping into one another like billiard balls.

Neither were people.

And perhaps that was why the philosophy appealed to me so strongly.

We do not simply pass through life in a straight line.

It is easy to speak of our environment as though it were scenery. We live in a house. We work in an organization. We belong to a community. We spend time with certain people. The language makes all of those things sound like containers within which our lives occur.

But the transactional view asks us to see something different.

The places we inhabit are helping to create us. The people with whom we spend our time are helping to create us. The institutions we participate in are helping to create us. And at the same time, simply by being present, we are helping to create and change them.

Every conversation leaves something behind. Every relationship changes the people who participate in it, even if only slightly. Every environment encourages certain parts of us and discourages others. Every repeated experience makes some future responses easier and others less likely.

We are continually affecting and being affected.

That doesn’t mean that every encounter is transformative or that we have no stable self. It means that a human life is not constructed in isolation. We become ourselves in relationship with the world. And similarly, the world changes in relationship to us.

And that realization carries an important responsibility.

If environments participate in shaping us, then choosing our environment is not a trivial matter. Neither is choosing our companions.

That is a much harder question.

The machine is a powerful metaphor—but an incomplete one

Somewhere along the way, I stopped talking about much of this as explicitly as I once had.

I never really lost the worldview itself. It continued to shape the way I understood people, organizations, health, stress, prevention, and change. I carried it into my research, my writing, and my professional work because it had become part of how I understood the world long before I ever knew the theories that gave it a name.

Perhaps that is why seeing Dewey’s name again felt so striking.

It didn’t remind me of something I had forgotten. It reminded me of the intellectual language for something I had never stopped believing.

What had changed was the environment around me.

Perhaps that isn’t surprising. Modern institutions often encourage us to think in more mechanistic ways. Transactional thinking was not always easy to explain in systems built around more linear models of cause and effect. Over time, I learned to translate the ideas into the language of the disciplines and institutions in which I worked, even when the underlying worldview remained the same.

Healthcare provides an obvious example. We search for the symptom, identify the cause, locate the malfunction, and apply the intervention—all consistent with a very Newtonian, linear cause-and-effect worldview.

There is enormous value in that approach. If an artery is blocked, an infection is present, or a bone is broken, identifying the problem and treating it can save a life.

But people are not merely machines with defective parts.

Illness occurs within relationships, families, communities, workplaces, histories, beliefs, fears, expectations, environments, and systems of care.

• A patient affects a clinician.
• A clinician affects a patient.
• The room matters.
• The words matter.
• The assumptions matter.
• The system surrounding both of them matters.

The same is true far beyond medicine.

• Families are transactional.
• Organizations are transactional.
• Communities are transactional.
• So are friendships, classrooms, marriages, neighborhoods, and societies.

And then I saw John Dewey on a wall

Dewey’s words reminded me not simply of something I had learned. They reminded me of who I had intended to become.

That can be an uncomfortable discovery.

The encounter did not give me a new direction. It helped me recognize an old one more clearly—and consider how I might follow it now with greater intention.

Most of us begin adulthood with some conception of the direction in which we want our lives to travel. Sometimes it is quite explicit. Sometimes it is little more than a sense of what matters and the kind of person we hope to be.

Then life happens.

• Careers acquire momentum.
• Responsibilities accumulate.
• Institutions impose their own logic.
• Crises demand attention.
• Other people’s needs become urgent.

And without ever making a deliberate decision to abandon our path, we can discover one day that we have wandered surprisingly far from it.

There is temptation in such moments to imagine that we should somehow go back.

But we cannot.

The person who originally chose that path no longer exists. Too many transactions have occurred. Too much has been learned, lost, loved, endured, created, regretted, and understood.

Going backward would violate the very philosophy that drew me to Dewey in the first place.

But there can be a parallel path

That is the thought I have been sitting with since my latest encounter with Dewey.

Perhaps the task is not to find the old road.

Perhaps it is to remember what made us choose it.

Those questions can point us toward redefining the path or possibly even forging a new path—not identical to the old one, because neither we nor the world are identical to what we were then, but perhaps parallel to its original intention.

And that may be enough.

We begin where we actually are.

With the person we have become. With the knowledge we now possess. With the relationships, opportunities, limitations, responsibilities, disappointments, and possibilities that exist now.

Then we engage with them more intentionally.

We spend more time in places that call forth the life we once envisioned. We seek relationships in which growth can move in both directions. We create environments that make kindness, curiosity, reflection, creativity, and possibility more likely.

We notice what the world is doing in response to us.

And we pay closer attention to what we are doing in the world.

Self-development is not simply a solitary act of will. We do not decide who we will become and then manufacture that person entirely from within. We are continually participating in environments and relationships that make some ways of being easier and others harder.

We shape them, and they shape us.

Perhaps a life does not need to follow a straight path to remain faithful to its deepest intentions.

Seeing Dewey’s words again did not leave me thinking, I used to know who I was and somehow lost myself.

It left me with something more hopeful.

I once recognized a direction that mattered deeply to me. Life carried me through many other experiences, responsibilities, relationships, and unexpected turns. I am no longer the person who first chose that path, and the world around me is no longer the same world.

So perhaps returning is neither possible nor necessary.

But my worldview remains consistent and recovering the direction I was traveling is still possible.

And now may be as good a time as any.

That may be why encountering an old philosophical friend on a university wall felt so significant. Had I seen those same words at another time in my life, I might have smiled at the familiarity and kept walking.

But I encountered them now, at a moment when I am once again thinking carefully about alignment—about my values, the life I want to live, and the direction of a new chapter.

Was it simply coincidence?

Perhaps.

But meaning does not necessarily reside in the event alone. It can emerge from the meeting between an event and the person who encounters it.

Maybe that is part of what Dewey and Bentley were trying to teach me all those years ago.

Encountering my old friend on the wall reminded me that perhaps we cannot return to an earlier path because we are no longer the person who first walked it—but we can recover its direction.

There is never a better time than the Present to do so.

The words on the wall did not change.

I had.

And in that particular encounter between an old idea and the person I have become, something new became possible.

Perhaps that was not a return to the old path at all.

Perhaps it was redefining a parallel one.