It's Too Late for You
Some rules we make for ourselves we'd never ask anyone else to follow
“If you could go back and relive your life, what age would you go back to?”
I’ve been thinking about this since I posed the question to my boyfriend one night on our RV trip exploring the shoreline of Lake Superior.
As I’ve contemplated, I realized childhood and teenage years would be an absolute skip for me. I love that I grew up in a social media-free world and spent most of my days outside, using my imagination. I wouldn’t redo that.
Sometimes I daydream about a life after high school. One where I skip college, become a flight attendant, study languages, fly internationally, see the world, and write about my experiences.
Imagining rolling back the clock, I see myself living a nomadic, single life, which is strange, considering I've spent most of my adult life in long-term relationships. I’ve daydreamed of living like the writer Colin Wright, who owned a mere 52 things and traveled the globe. He lived the life I live in my fantasies.
I have a bad habit of re-imagining the past, a past that ironically puts me in a similar place to where I am now. It’s a hobby at this point; I can spend hours exploring alternative realities, yet they keep dropping me into the same present moment, which, as good news, means I truly like my life.
The idea of going back and getting to do it again is flawed. It suggests that our 20s are the most important. As if it’s the only time open for adventure and spontaneity. I know this isn’t true, yet I’ve felt that way most of my life.
I did the predictable thing: college, marriage, grad school, and then divorce. The last part was far from my life plan, and when it happened, I honestly thought doing it again and adding kids to the mix was off the table for me. At first, I attributed this belief to the pain I had experienced in my marriage and the ending of it. But the wounds have healed, and now, on the eve of 36, I still find myself holding onto the belief: it’s too late for you.
Logically, I know the absurdity of this way of thinking. Many of my friends have gotten married well after 35, and some still plan to build families.
It’s interesting how we can build rules for ourselves. Laws we would never expect another to honor, rules we would likely tell them are nonsensical and need to be broken.
Yet I still have my rules. And it’s left me with the dreaded feeling of being too late.
The upside to this feeling is detachment. I don’t have any future fantasies I hold myself to. When I keep my mind from wandering to the past, I fully immerse myself in the joys of the present moment.
There is an idea that we will always mourn the life we didn’t live. No matter the choices we make.
When we are coupled, we mourn the single life. When we are single, we crave coupling.
We mourn the path we didn't take in college, the lover we let go, the job we didn't take… or even the one we did. The woulda and coulda can poison our present-day joy if we let them.
There is a part of me that will always hold a space of grief for the life I thought was mine. Not because I want it, but because I didn’t get to keep it.
It’s like the toy the toddler never plays with until she sees someone else pick it up; the craving comes.
Thankfully, contentment comes easily to me. I find joy in the smallest things. I don’t get jealous of others’ lives (unless they have a souped-up camper van).
I’ve built a life around my ability to stay, to endure.
For me, life doesn’t feel like a novel. I don’t have a beautiful storyline that climaxes and then ends in happily ever after. It’s more a series of short stories. Some are dark and painful. Some are invigorating and expansive. And some just are. They are tales about being where your feet are and appreciating the little joys and simple pleasures that come when you are open to the possibility that life isn’t supposed to be linear and there is no right path to take.
What I am learning is that you can reinvent and iterate at any point.
You can have adventure well past your hair turning grey and fine lines forming. There is no expiration date on starting fresh. You just have to decide and move differently than you did before.
It’s not easy, and if you allow the grief of things lost to move through you, it will lead to growth.