Life Is a Curved Road

Why do we have to live our lives in a straight line?

I never questioned it. Not until the line disappeared.

I fell in love with football when I was five or six years old. That was my line. Clear, straight, obvious. My mum said that even when I was deep into something else, the moment she told me it was time for football I just stood up and went. No questions. No hesitation.

I followed that path for years. Played top level youth football. Teammates of mine became professional players. The game got more serious. And somewhere along the way — without me knowing it — the joy was slowly being killed.

Then something unexpected happened.

A scriptwriter had been following our youth team for inspiration. Two years later there was a casting for a TV series about football players in our age group. I went in. I got the part.

Later I found out I had been cast to play the fictional version of me.

Luckily — I was the best one to play me.

That day I walked into a world I didn’t know existed. A life, a job, an opportunity that wasn’t supposed to be possible where I came from. I saw a different path. A curved road I had never seen before.

And then the shooting ended.

And I went into the biggest crisis of my life.

I had been told — not directly, but indirectly — that you have to follow a line through life. Football, then business school, then professional football, then CEO. That was the path. That was the line in my head.

And it was broken.

I tried to pick up a new line — becoming an actor. That broke too. And for many years afterwards there was so much stress. So much searching. You have to find your purpose. You have to find the box that fits you. And if you’re lucky it’s an exciting box.

Mine was broken. And it left me with a crisis I think could have been avoided.

Years later I moved back to the area where I grew up. Different small town, same region. And I started meeting people I hadn’t talked to in 25 years.

Every time someone asked what I had been doing — I started to doubt myself.

I was ashamed that I wasn’t becoming rich or successful in the traditional way. That in many ways I had wasted my life. Divorced, not rich, no clear path. What was there to explain?

And then I realized something.

The premise was wrong. The one-line rule — follow one path, one purpose, one box — that was never my line. My line was always many different lines. And the stress, the shame, the crisis — it came from trying to force myself into a shape I was never meant to fit.

I turned the shame into something else. Not overnight. But slowly.

Because what I realized was that I didn’t want to follow one line. I wanted to try so many different things. Hear stories. Live stories. Be part of stories with many different people.

I don’t want to be a one-line guy. A one-purpose person.

I just want to live.

And I think a lot of people feel the same — but they force themselves to follow a path they simply don’t have to follow.

This is My Life as a Drifter. I’m Jan Korgaard.

And remember — life is an unpredictable detour.