Making Decisions in Uncertain Times With Tennessee Williams

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.”

This line, from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tennessee Williams' play “Camino Real,” makes us re-examine ourselves and the decisions we've been putting off because we've been too comfortable with our situation, or too fearful of the unknown. I discuss more implications and interpretations in this episode featuring Williams and his works.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Quote of Corner. Today's quote is one of those lines that doesn't argue with you. It just sits there quietly until you realize it's describing something you've been wrestling with for longer than you'd like to admit. There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. That's Tennessee Williams from his 1953 play Camino Real, one of his more surreal, abstract works, far less produced than A Streetcar Named Desire, or The Glass Menagerie, but loaded with lines that punch well above the weight of the play's reputation. Williams was one of the defining American playwrights of the 20th century, Pulitzer Prize twice over, a writer who understood longing, entrapment, and the cost of staying somewhere past the point of honesty better than almost anyone. He also lived it. His personal life was defined by restlessness, reinvention, and a recurring tension between the comfort of the familiar and the pull towards something he couldn't always name. Which makes this particular line feel less like craft and more like confession. So, what is he actually saying? On the surface it sounds like permission, permission to leave something without having the next thing fully figured out. And it is that. But there's more underneath it because the word certain is doing a lot of work here. He doesn't say there's no place to go. He says there is no certain place. The distinction matters. Certainty is often what we're waiting for before we allow ourselves to move. The confirmed job offer, the guaranteed outcome, the reassurance that the next chapter will be better before we're willing to close this one. Williams is saying that waiting for certainty can itself become the trap. Think about how often people stay in situations they know aren't working. A job, a relationship, a city, a version of themselves, not because they don't sense that something needs to change, but because they can't see clearly enough where the change would lead. The destination isn't visible, so they stay. And staying, over time, stops being a choice and starts becoming an identity. The person becomes the situation they couldn't bring themselves to leave. Williams understood that particular form of stagnation intimately. His plays are full of characters trapped by it, people who once had somewhere to go and miss the window, or who knew they should leave and kept finding reasons not to. Blanche Dubois. Tom Wingfield, they're not villains. They're people who couldn't reconcile the life in front of them with the one they felt called toward and paid dearly for the gap. What the quote is offering isn't recklessness, it's a reframe of what departure actually requires. We've built up this idea that responsible change means having a plan, that you don't leave until you know where you're going, that uncertainty is the enemy of good decisions, that readiness is a precondition of movement. And in some contexts, that's true. You don't quit your job on a Tuesday with no savings and no prospects and call it courage. But in a deeper sense, emotionally, existentially, there are moments when the honest recognition that something is over or wrong or finished is itself sufficient reason to move. When the departure is the right thing independent of the destination, when staying is the more dangerous choice, not because of what's waiting elsewhere, but because of what staying is quietly costing you. We talked before about William James and the art of knowing what to overlook, the discipline of not giving your attention to things that don't deserve it. There's a companion idea here, the discipline of not giving your presence to situations that no longer deserve it either, not out of avoidance, not out of impulsiveness, but out of honest assessment. Some departures are wisdom, not flight. The hard part, and Williams knew this too, is that the mind is very good at constructing reasons to stay, sunk cost, loyalty, fear dressed up as practicality. The story we tell ourselves that things might still turn around. The uncertainty of elsewhere feels more threatening than the certainty of here, even when here has stopped working. So we wait for a sign or a guarantee or a map, and sometimes none of those come. And the question Williams is quietly asking is, what do you do then? His answer, embedded in the line, is that the time to go can arrive before the destination does. That departure and direction are two separate things, and conflating them can keep you anchored to something past its time indefinitely. Now, the honest counterpoint because this show earns nothing without it. Not every impulse to leave is wisdom. Sometimes what feels like the call to depart is actually discomfort with difficulty. The natural friction of something worth doing that hasn't gotten easy yet, a relationship in a hard season, a career path that requires more patience than you currently have, a place or a commitment that asks more of you than feels fair in the moment. Those things don't always deserve departure. Sometimes they deserve more time, more effort, or a different approach, which is exactly what Sun Tzu was pointing toward in a previous episode. The distinction is one of honesty. Is this the recognition that something is genuinely finished, that continuing would require you to compromise something essential? Or is it the avoidance of something that's simply hard? Those feel similar from the inside. They're very different in what they're asking of you. Williams isn't handing you a permission slip for impulsiveness, he's validating something more specific, the moment of clear-eyed recognition that departure is the right move, even when the next chapter hasn't revealed itself yet. That moment deserves to be honored, not indefinitely postponed in the name of certainty that may never arrive. Bourdain put it a different way. Travel is education for living, and education requires the willingness to leave the familiar. You can't discover what's out there if you won't move. The geography changes, but the principle doesn't. Growth has a cost of entry, and that cost is usually the security of where you already are. There is a time for departure. Williams doesn't tell you how to know when that time has come. That's yours to figure out, and it's some of the hardest figuring a person ever does. But he's telling you that the absence of a certain destination is not by itself a reason to stay. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is go. Even into the uncertain. Especially into the uncertain. Thanks for being here at the Quote of Corner. If this one landed close to something you've been pondering, a decision you've been deferring, a door you've been standing in front of, mull it over a little longer, but not too much longer. And don't forget, wisdom isn't in the quote, it's in the reflection. I'll see you in the next one.