One of the central plot points and metaphors for Completeness is a computer science problem called The Travelling Salesman Problem. It's simply stated but currently unsolvable problem in computer science. "Given a series of X points on a graph, what's the most optimal path to visit all the points in the least amount of distance?" The problem is one of complexity, with six points a human can do it, but by the time you get to 12 or 15 or 100 points, the number of possible paths increases exponentially and surpasses the ability of even the fastest computers to solve in less than hundreds of years. I've been thinking about the relationship between the TSP and romance, as per Completeness. My obvious directing challenge is to take this highly abstract idea about our inability to accurately predict the best possible outcome and keep this small scaled and human.
On the one hand, the traveling salesman problem is one of certainty, but that's actually the end problem. ie, How do we know we are making the best choice? But the practical challenge of the problem is executional. How long and how many paths do I have to go down to pick a better choice? or even worse, how many choices do we have to explore before committing to a particular path? The challenges of determining even a semi-optimal series are very great because of the multiplicity of choices.
This is a human problem. What's the best choice I can make right now? I try to predict outcomes, but I'm actually really bad at it; in general our brains are terrible at juggling probability. When I was younger, I acutely felt threatened by decisions. In our twenties, I always felt that all these decision points got more and more risky the closer they got to reality. I picked up a weird lifetime habit of not closing cabinet doors ("maybe I'll need to return here in a moment"), and used to take 2, 3, or 4 jobs ("we'll see which one works best") in multiple careers simultaneously.
We're so prone to change at that age that every choice we make has a huge impact on our future trajectory, not just professionally but as human beings. I could never see forward momentum without being acutely aware of the opportunities and paths I chose not to take. I've lost track of how many times I remade myself in my twenties. It was a period of intense self-definition.
It's easy, now at 43 years old, to forget how stressful that process is. It was so hard that I preferred to work two or three jobs rather than commit to a specific path. At one point in a single year, I was directing a professional play, writing another, adapting a third, rehearsing a high school musical, writing mapping software, designing catalog software for Playboy, doing Oracle Database Administration, learning Java, starting a small business, and making wedding preparations.
Insane.
But having to reverse course has always seemed dangerous to me. Less about the lost time (more of a consideration now), but the sense that I would be unmaking part of me that I had created. This was a persistent illusion up through my mid-thirties. How much of myself was invested in maintaining possibilities, of finding the best possible future, of solving the Hamiltonian, travelling-salesman NP problem of my life.
And this is the challenge that Elliot and Molly face. To find for themselves what is enough even as they learn who they are. To find mastery in a world without any possibility of certainty. And ultimately, to move from reason to faith. Because that's where love always begins, a deliberate sacrifice of certainty for possibility.
This feels like the human motion of the play, this back and forth uncertainty between Elliot and Molly as they try and negotiate an actual love affair as adults instead of children. They have been taught that they can solve the trickiest problems with intellect and analysis. When analytic certainty eludes them, they anxiously cast about, convinced that it's going wrong, that it isn't right. That the next opportunity will bring certainty and not foil their intellectual capacity to discern the best path. But like the Traveling Salesman, it's the very hunt for that solution that eludes them.
Love might be blind, but it's damn certain it can't do math.
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