Ever had a conversation where you realize partway through that you sound like someone you used to think was old? I was recently talking with a senior in college about what she wants to do after graduation. She is planning on going to law school, but wants to work for a year first. She spent a semester of her junior year abroad and she absolutely loved it. I asked if she had considered looking for a job overseas.
“I’d LOVE to,” she said. “But I can’t do that. I just feel like I need to start building my real life.”
I’m not usually one to give people strongly worded advice, but the next thing I knew I was begging her to reconsider.
“You don’t understand, you’ll never be this free again!”
“If you’re going to go to school anyway, one year is the perfect time.”
“Of course you can get a job there, you’re super qualified.”
“If you don’t do it now, you may never do it.”
I don’t think I’ve ever said any of those sentences before. I’m not sure I ever even thought those things. But as she continued talking about the mostly self-imposed pressure she’s feeling, visions of myself at her age were crystallizing in my head in a way they never had before. I remember being anxious to get my life started, to have a job and an apartment and to feel like a grown up. Doing something exotic seemed irresponsible, like running away. I was eager to be mature. And competent.
The conversation stuck with me for a few days. I kept thinking about how much I wished she would just go for it. How much I wished that I would have gone for a few things.
I have a thing about regret: I don’t like it. At all. I know no one likes regret, but I have at least three specific strategies I employ to avoid it. The first, and the one I use the least, is to consciously tell myself “no regrets!” when I make a decision. It helps me own the decision and forget about the path not taken. The second thing I do when ruefulness starts to creep in is remind myself that I have a great life, and that it would never look like this if I hadn’t made the choices I did, and blah blah blah.
If you would call her a celebrity, I have a celebrity-crush on Samantha Power, journalist and author who covered war in Serbia and Bosnia and wrote a book about the Rwandan genocide. Later, she was appointed the Ambassador to the UN by President Obama. I admire her deeply. She’s down to earth and smart and funny and authentically committed to working for a more just world. I’ve heard her on podcasts or NPR shows a few times in the last few years and every time I got a weird twinge of regret that left me thinking “I could have done better things with my life.” I told her as much when I got to meet her at a book signing for her memoir The Education of an Idealist this past September. She was lovely and gracious and said “No! Everything you did brought you to where you are today!”
Apparently she is also a fan of strategy 2. And there’s merit to it. No use in dwelling on things that you can’t change. But there is a third strategy also, and it’s the most problematic: I blame “the universe” instead of making choices or doing hard things.
I went to grad school for journalism a year after college and I hated it. But before that, I took the GRE and fell a few points short of the requirement for my dream program which had a different focus and might have been a much better fit for me. Instead of studying a few more hours and taking the exam a second time, I shrugged and said “I guess it’s just not meant to be,” and then wasted a year and whole lot of money on a degree I should never have pursued. The primary reason I didn’t take it again was that I was in a hurry to have the decision made, to know where my life was headed.
Don’t get me wrong, I like where I am today. I had a really great career in the field I stumbled into. I have a wonderful husband and a life that is rich in both relationships and experiences. But I can’t stop thinking that I sold myself short. I think it’s possible that I could have had a bit more impact by now if I had been less eager to get my life in order, and more eager to maximize my own capabilities. That GRE thing is just one example. Too often I was either too under-confident, lazy, or impatient and I wish I had been more willing to test myself.
Leaving things up to “the universe” is a cop-out.
I’ve been given a lot in this life. I need to recognize more clearly when it’s up to me to go after something, even if it’s difficult or requires more work. I don’t have to be famous or work for a President or even write a memoir. But I do need to better honor my own ambitions and give the universe more of a fight.