I’m visting my son in Michigan where he’s at school and I was talking with one of his college roommates. I sat on an incredibly comfortable couch (that was going to give me a backache) in their filthy living room. My son’s friends are amazing. Kind, genuine young men who are so much wiser than I was at their age. Back then, I thought old people had just made a bad choice to be so unstylishly old. I believed that I had naturally figured out life by being young — an excellent choice that rewarded me in many ways. It turns out that I loved taking credit for undeserved blessings.
One of my son’s incredibly smart friends, on the cusp of entering the post-college adult world, asked me how I decided to live the way I did. What about the payoffs and compromises that are made in the big choices between following one’s heart and grinding out a career? He’s trying to decide how he will approach his life, and wondering with some anxiety about what mistakes he might avoid.
All of us know that as we grow old our list of regrets lengthens. Should I have taken more risks? Should I have followed that dream? Should I have ground out a few more years at that job? Should I have finished school? Should I have dropped out? Why didn’t I play it safe/take that job/leave it all to travel…
I told him that I have a friend who had achieved enviable success as a playwright. He lived in a rented apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn populated mostly by bankers. Each night one winter, he walked past gorgeous brownstone townhouses. As the snow fell, he passed scenes illuminated in lead-lined windows of happy families around a fire, in living rooms the size of his entire apartment. He wondered if he should have been a banker.
I told him that I had to believe that as the bankers got up from rolling another log onto the fire, they remembered a spreadsheet that couldn’t wait until morning, and they wondered, “Should I have been a writer?”
What this young man was worried about was regret. He didn’t want to get it wrong. None of us do. He believes that there exists a very thin path, amid the brambles of our present, that borders the mountains of ‘fuck it’ and prairies of 'be careful.’ He wanted to find that path and thread his way past both into a regret-free future. I told him that the path is a lie. There is no path. Every direction we walk into necessarily shuts out the possibilities of every other path. Each step into life is a brutal pruning from infinite possibility to finite reality. But what we also must realize, is the opposite is also true!
Life is a constantly forking path. And each direction we travel leads to more possibilities — opportunities that were not open to us at the trailhead. “Yes” and “No” are intertwined in an improbable dance that we do for our entire lives. It feels confining at times, and at others, it is utterly liberating, but it’s an adventure and adventures are harrowing.
Jonathan Swift said, “No wise man ever wished to be younger.” I will amend that to add, “No tired man either.” Because I am tired. But it’s a happy tired, filled with gratitude and regret, hope and fear, joy and sadness, and an appreciation of every path that took every one of us to the place we are right now.
Fearing the future, regretting the past, and loving the present here with you, I am,
Sean Sakamoto
great, thought producing article,]. Thank you
Loved this. Each path may hold regrets which can feel unavoidable. Better to focus on the positive reasons the choices we make between forked paths afford us. And I agree that more forks mean more options open. Regret can take up too much headspace and spoil precious time. Live, move, decide and cherish every path unfolding.