If you’ll allow me to talk in very abstract terms for a bit, I’ll hope to impart some wisdom I’m finding in my late-twenties.
There was a time when I more or less knew what was coming next. Life used to have a sense of progression marked by clear lines of change. Summer vacations, graduations, first dates, first jobs, moving away, those kinds of things. It was systems and tropes that pointed you in the direction your life was heading. Change was on its way and you knew roughly when and roughly what it would look like.
Goals and ambition work best inside structure. That’s the whole design of school. Execute well, receive a grade, advance. There’s a rhythm baked in. But once you leave that structure, goals become abstract. There’s no one hovering over your life with a rubric. Maybe that’s why people find solace in religion.
What I found was that my goals had always been set for me by the structures I was inside. When I left them I didn’t know how to set my own, which left me aimless. Setting goals can sound easy — just decide to dedicate yourself to be the “best this” or “most that.” Superlative language in goal setting is the cop-out answer and unfortunately the default.
In that time, having that next step mapped out made it easier to live in the present. If tomorrow is already planned out for you, it’s easier to indulge in the sweetness of now. One of life’s hardest lessons is learning we have free will and building the courage to use it. That realization arrives at different times for different people. Some find it in school, others in adulthood, some never. But I’ve noticed it tends to arrive only after you catch yourself waiting for the next thing to come and start wondering why it hasn’t shown up yet. There will be times when you’re between chapters. Something important ends and the loudness of its urgency goes quiet, leaving you in the gap between beats. Those gaps can be days or years depending on what you’re looking for and how honest you’re willing to be with yourself about it. Be a little romantic about what’ll come next. But be willing to accept that what you want it to be and what it actually becomes are almost never the same thing.If I can be egotistical for a second, I think the wisest thing I’ve ever said is that life is like a scatter plot. A life doesn’t amount to anything; more so it shapes into many iterations before it reaches its final shape, oblong, goofy and beautiful. Stop stressing about what your life will add up to and consider finding freedom in what you’re open to it becoming. You have to live a lesson to actually learn it but if I can offer any advice it would be to loosen your grip.
Learning to close that gap between expectation and reality is one of life’s first real exams. And the hardest part of passing it is making peace with mediocrity which is really a derogatory word to describe our limitations. So if we can’t see our limitations as invitations for other people to be excellent, we’ll spend our lives bitter and yearning. A bitter yearner waits for large chunks of their life for a chapter that never comes, while everyone around them finds enough worthwhile to spend the time well.