I was talking with the father of one of my good friends. This is a man who I respect quite highly for having secured what is, to me, one of the most healthy and desirable lifestyles I could ever ask for. He's payed relatively well because he's earned it through a harmony of impressive academic history, and immense drive and passion to prove himself as a person. He has fully raised two wonderful, and intelligent children who now, in adulthood, amazingly seem to be independently set out to live as full and good a life as he did. He is happily married to an incredibly insightful and intellectually complementary woman. And his values in family, work, leisure, and curiosity are still strong as stone.
So, it should be no surprise that it felt somewhat daunting to produce a satisfactory answer when he asked me, "What are your plans after graduation?"
I don't even know what country I'll be living in, let alone the even finer details like post-graduate education or a career. I offered the only honest answer I could provide:
"Well, that is the great question mark. I've gone a good 4 years without facing one like it, so it seems like it's about time."
He closed his eyes and nodded in complete empathy. Of course, this is a person who is no stranger to the feeling I've just expressed. He raised his head, put on a smile, and proceeded, "Well, there'll be another great question mark every four years for the rest of your life". This resonates pretty strongly with the echoes of my past. Although, previously I had always thought each crossroads was the last major one. Again, I felt like each was the last plateau that I had to reach before securing happiness.
Let's take the six-year-old Petar for example's sake. He looked up at his nine or ten year old brother and thought "Once I can do all that stuff, I'll be completely happy". You hit ten and all of a sudden you're in the big kids playground, you get to stay up a little bit later, your allowance is higher, you get to watch more TV shows, you're even taller. Or at least that's how it seems. Four more years has a tendency to emotionally, and at least as a kid, even physically dwarf you.
Four years down the road from ten? At fourteen? Go see 14-A movies, stay home alone, start using a cell-phone. Odds are, one also has
Four years down the road from there I'm eighteen years old and I can vote, buy lottery tickets, and drive independently. I've experienced alcohol, notably how simultaneously wonderful and devastating it can be. I'd be graduating high-school soon. And for many, there's a good chance to encounter at least some curiosity - to put it lightly - about exploring sexuality.
And yet 18 still seemed so unanswered. It was probably one of the least confident and secure ages of my life, if I remember correctly. This was the age where the physical and experiential disconnect among my peers and I was wider than ever. Some friends were drinking, others had never tried. Some friends had been having sex for a while now, while others hadn't started. I watched friends get torn apart by both the fear, and conversely the abuse, of smoking pot. It was not a comfortable age.
In my opinion, I feel very fortunate and thankful to have found myself on a sort of "middle ground" of all these differences. Though, it seemed just as isolated as the extremes. We were diverging, and we were worried that very few of us were getting life right. And what made it worse is that we were too young to realize that divergence of lifestyles is not only normal, but expected.
And after all that, I was faced with my next major question mark. What do I do after high school?
Perhaps in the next four years I would have finally settled into my appropriate lifestyle. Like there was a train-track that I would find somewhere, and once I did I could cruise on it through the rest of my normal life. And don't be mistaken, I was more worried of this than I was hopeful. University, to me, felt like the end. I would graduate, get a job at a desk, and do the same thing for the rest of my life. I didn't want to move away from this last major fork in the road.
Well I'm standing here, four years past that fork in the road at twenty-two, looking back and thinking only one thing: How beautifully and overwhelmingly naive! And I was smart back then too! I'm about to graduate and I'm still faced with so many decisions! I'm about to experience genuine independence.
A lot of people think university life is independence but it isn't. I more or less knew exactly how long I'd be doing it for. I more or less knew exactly how much money I'd spend over the next four years. It was pseudo-independence at its finest. Hell, I didn't even have to worry about keeping the house clean when I had no dependants, or respectable guests* coming over.
*Friends, I respect you and all, but you know what I mean - your house was a full-on shit box too.
I'll be entering true independence soon, and I've never felt so off-rails in my entire life. Perhaps I'll get a masters, but eventually I will find a career and when I do, I have no idea if I will stay with it for twelve months or twenty years. In the future, I'll be moving in with someone. I'll be marrying someone I love. We'll end up searching for a suitable family home. We'll probably have children. This may all sound so normal that it's bland, but it's really not. I mean, sexual maturity is something everyone goes through but it never feels bland. Now we're talking about raising human beings! Think about that for a second. I'll never be so full of crossroads as when I'm the primary source of guidance for human beings. Human beings who will be going through the exact crossroads I've just described. And it won't end there.
"Well, there'll be another great question mark every four years for the rest of your life", he said.
And it's exactly what I needed to hear.
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