"Just try to remember that making someone happy isn't only about finding the answers, it could also be about shaping the question."
-Finding Paradise
So, I visited my grandparents the other day. It was a pleasant trip, all told. It has been a long time since I’ve been able to see them regularly, and even with the temp checks and the copies of vaccine cards it’s beyond wonderful that at least this part of my life has returned to feeling at least somewhat normal. As normal as anything seems these days. That remains one of the overwhelming trends in conversation these days, interpersonal and at work. My more frequent quip is, “Isn’t it a little tiring living through the end of the world?” But even with the weight of COVID, there were other spots of light- namely finally getting a look at my grandmother’s recipe box (but, sadly, not before it went from being a binder to being a box), examining my great and great-great grandparents photos alongside my grandfather, and discussing all the family milestones upcoming (August and September are busy months in my family).
We naturally got on the topic of my birthday and in doing so stumbled onto a uniquely interesting fact: I will be as old tomorrow as my grandparents were when they had my parents.
Add into that the fact my mother’s also adopted, and things got a little existential behind my continued polite interest and continued conversation.
That the age of COVID and other natural and other limitations of my age have, at best, adjusted the milestones of a generation is perhaps an understatement. This, combined with my own natural drive towards productivity and achievement can create more than a typical gulf between legitimate achievement and the sense of therein. What that means is that, even knowing what I have accomplished, my gut instinct is to immediate follow that statement with the parenthetical (what is that, exactly?). To be twenty-six and where I’m at, compared to where others have been or are?
There is obviously a kind of disconnect there, and perhaps more than an unhealthy mindset, but it’s important to examine this as yet another year of my life comes to a close (and another, naturally, begins). To look forward is still to see a web of opportunities, mingled with that nagging sense of closing doors based on which of these paths I descend. (One of the bigger reasons I rooted for House Baelish through GoT? “What is it you want, my lord?” “Oh, everything, my dear. Everything there is.”) And why shouldn’t I? Isn’t that what we were told growing up- that we can be anything? Do anything? Get anything?
Well, no. We’ve all our limitations, not the least of which is time, a limited resource that necessitates a simple truth: anything is not everything. When I stopped growing at the great old height of 5’4, I’m pretty sure we all came to the conclusion that a future in the NBA was most likely out of my sphere of “anything.” The various rejections in my life, of the professional and personal nature, are likewise things mostly outside of my control that have limited the scope of the achievable, the “anything.” That I could do something like write a fifty-thousand word novel in a month and guess the grapes used to make a glass of wine without seeing the bottle likewise directed me down other paths. That’s part of the variety of life, that we are at once limited by and guided by our talents and our circumstances- be their fairly or unfairly distributed (and however we gauge that).
At our best, we can console ourselves with the platitudinal advice that such things are, in a twisted way of looking at it, necessary. That we are who we are for them, like it or not. It’s one of the reasons why I so enjoy the game Finding Paradise (which, even if one is not into video games, I highly recommend playing). The game posits a world where scientists can rewrite the memories of a person on their deathbed so they at least recall having their “perfect life” before they die. But when assigned to at once give a man his perfect life, but to change as little as possible, they have to examine what exactly is the nature of regret. The game’s eventual conclusion?
“Regrets… Yeah, I have a lot of those. But… that’s okay. The chances I missed, the mishaps, and all that I wish I had… Well, they were all still a part of it. They made way for all that I have. And what I do have… I wouldn’t trade for anything else in the world.”
There’s a lot of looking back in that kind of thinking, sure. Boats against the current, and all that. We know I’ve experienced this, and will keep experiencing it.
Klara and the Sun had a particularly biting way of looking at this: “‘Hope,’ he said. ‘Damn thing never leaves you alone.’”
Especially when you examine regret as the eventual outcome of quixotic hope. But Finding Paradise’s look at life is uniquely present, too. Appreciation may be the antidote for existential regret, but there’s no reason one cannot appreciate what one has and yet hope for more. If not everything, or even anything, than at least something. Better? Well, we find out in the end, if we’re lucky.
Already there’s that sense of possibility, of chance, of expansion and change as we look to the year before us. There are more stories to write, more opportunities to explore, and more things to experience. I’ve bought concert and musical tickets, plane tickets, made dinner reservations, and put my ears to the ground. Seismic change may be upon us, or else the kind of natural evolution that stems from examining one’s circumstances and preparing to either adapt or grow (these are not necessarily synonyms).
But through all that drive, at the end of every day, I get to go home to my apartment… my apartment. I get to look at the art I’ve bought, the wine and whiskey (and whisky) I’ve collected, my new dyed hair in the mirror. It’s been a year, and it’s still me. In a year, it will still be me. A life built equally of limitations and opportunities. Choices, at once for my effort and my time. Going forward at least, time’s mine, and there’s something comforting and terrifying about it.
Another year ahead.