You can drive yourself nuts thinking about all the things you could have done differently in your life. You can make yourself miserable thinking about all the missed opportunities. Besieged by what ifs. Haunted by if only. Tormented by what you could have said, what you should have said. Why you overreacted to this but let that go.
Time bends in on you. That day forty years ago is so clear in your mind. Yesterday is a blur. Was that really already ten years ago? Has it really been two years since I saw….? Why do I remember that stupid conversation from the sixth grade? Why does that one remark from thirty years ago still sting? Did that really happen? Was it as I remember it or have I exaggerated it in the retellings?
Choices. That’s what life’s really about. Did you make the right ones? Are you making the right ones? Do you have enough of them? It seems at times too many. It can be dangerous to have a lot of choices because so many are the wrong ones. For that matter two choices could be one too many because that extra one leads to disaster.
If we’re lucky we face a lot of choices. The enslaved have fewer. The desperately poor don’t have many. Neither do the permanently crippled. Choices are for the healthy, the free, the solvent. A lot of choices come when we’re young, often when we’re ill-equipped to make them. Sometimes we make choices when we don’t need to. It can be hard to stay the course. Doing something else, another direction, the grass on the other side, the bright shiny new thing, all are temptations. As the song goes, we don’t know what we got till it’s gone. Truth. We’re fine. But see something else and….
The worst choices are the ones made on impulse. I’ve made plenty of those. So many regrettable ones. So many things that sounded good at the time.
All this is maddening. There is no guide, no rule book, no syllabus for life. You can get something along those lines if you follow a religion but then you’re being fed all manner of mythology, unreal expectations and sometimes you have unnatural strictures placed on your actions. Religion gives you easy answers but they’re often the wrong ones and put demands on you.
So it’s hard. Parents can guide us. That can be good, bad or have decidedly mixed results. The best parenting requires clear boundaries but also opportunities for young people to learn to make their own decisions.
Decision-making, choices really start hitting you in college. What should I major in? What classes will I take? Should I date this person? Should I go to the party or study? Who are my new friends? Should I change my major? Should I drop this class? Should I do an internship? Where? What’ll I do this weekend?
For most young people going to college means freedom. Not everyone is ready for it. I remember my freshman year (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) and how different the maturity levels of my fellow newbies were. Some had cars, had been in relationships and were experts on drugs. Others were virgins, couldn’t drive and had never been high. Some were all in on academics on day one and others were all in on getting high on day one. We came from all over the state. There were students from small logging towns, from Orange County, from poor neighborhoods of San Francisco, from Bay Area suburbs, from valley towns, from beach towns and me from radical Berkeley, a veteran of campus demonstrations who believed he hailed from the center of the known universe.
Who you associated with and how you got along was not easy to navigate. Choices. Adding to the complexity were girls, most of whom had entered or were entering womanhood. Some were shy, some sophisticated. She was clearly a virgin, she was clearly not. Who could tell about her, her and her. She was out of my league. She still had braces. She was too tall. She was funny but weird. She was pretty but uninteresting. She didn’t seem to like me. She did.
I was on the soccer team. Long hard practices. Being part of a team. Suddenly competing with players as good as I was. Some were — I had to admit, better (not much). It was a lot.
I made choices in my first few years of college that affected the rest of my life. Some were good. Some I still suffer for. Like I said at the beginning, you can drive yourself nuts thinking about this stuff. It’s best not to. Living in the moment is the wise thing to do. Talk about easier said than done.
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