How We Get To Where We Are

It’s an odd (if not cruel) obligation of contemporary life that we make the most important decisions about the direction we take when we’re least ready to make them – in our late teens (work? college? rock star?), our twenties (marriage? grad school? career?), and tweaked perhaps in our early thirties (children? divorce? rent or buy?). Yes, we do get some help (occasionally requested, more often disregarded) from well-meaning parents, family, teachers, friends. But most of these early decisions are – admit it – made in the urge of the moment, if not pure whim. And looking back from the distance of age at those 20 years or so of decisions, it’s difficult to cut through the tangled web of chance and accident, good luck and misfortune, to discern any coherent through-line as one might find in the plot of a well-made play. Life is more a pinball game than an itinerary. We make decisions when they need to be made, but there is no plan that charts our future. When looking back, the best we can hope for is that somehow it all worked out for the best, that we arrived not perhaps where we’d hoped to arrive, but still in not that bad a place at all. Somehow we end up where we are.