When Choice Was Yours for the Taking

At 20, I thought I’d be married by 24, two kids by 26. We’d take them to church on Sundays, have a standing date night on Fridays, the shared calendar would send me reminders about his appointments and their playdates. And I’m 29 and find myself in an Airstream outside of Santa Barbara, packing up after a few days to drive to a cabin in the hills of Los Angeles for the rest of the month to work and write and read and set intentions for the last year of my 20s. I don’t remember the last time I went to church, the idea of which feels only marginally further away than marriage and children.

It’s been one year since I sold much of what I own, stored what I saved in the garage of the house I grew up in, moved out of Chicago, and set out for an undetermined amount of time on the road. I went first on the road literally, on a road trip south, stopping in Tennessee and landing in Texas, and then later by plane for months in New York City, Paris, and now Los Angeles. I lived in Los Angeles before Chicago, during the first half of my 20s, with such uncertainty and insecurity that I left to try the only other city I knew just as well. I didn’t love it and I don’t think it loved me. 

I’ve never been one for astrology, but I learned of this concept called a Saturn Return, this period of time when Saturn is back in the same place it was when you were born. It’s often known as a tumultuous phase in a person’s life, somewhere between your late 20s and early 30s, where things start to rearrange. Growing pains and growth, cutting ties or committing, evaluation and reevaluation, a reckoning with your responsibility and with your history. And I’m 29, and I don’t know if it’s Saturn, or the moon, an energetic or spiritual force I can’t understand, or if it’s the clear and physical reality of aging, both the witness to and victim of time passing across a body, but everything now feels consequential in a way it did not before, without the buffer of youth and the guarantee of time.   

I’ve reached the end of this decade, and years, ten years, went by with great intensity in some ways, and even greater passivity in others. I feel time slipping. The patterns start to reveal themselves, in myself, in those around me, in the world, where and what we settle for, where and what we risk, and where we do nothing. Ten years, time slipping, and the threat of eventually having to reconcile a life lived aimlessly, under any degree of apathy, became more tangible. And so I packed, I left, and I did something different.

I’m driving south along the coast thinking back to a writer's retreat I went to a few years ago. One exercise asked us to look at regret, or the possibility of regret, what that means and what that motivates in our lives. We wrote, and were then paired up at random to discuss with a partner. Mine was a man in his late 60s, recently widowed. He said to me, plainly and honestly, “I looked up and she had died and my life had gone by. I don’t know where my life went. Or who I became. There were things I wanted to do, things I wanted to be. We had a good marriage. I made the money, I had the kids, I bought the house. But I don’t know where my life went.” 

On the edge of a new decade, with enough exposure to have felt and seen the effects of yielding to the familiar, the precipice of regret looms. I see where it takes root, where intuition is either followed or ignored, ideas pursued or left to fade. Complacency plus routine plus time settles into days that drag slowly and years that pass quickly. We hear stories all the time, those that look back with longing, in disbelief that time takes, unforgiving. Decades pass, time slips, and “I looked up and my life had gone by. I don’t know where my life went.”  

How do we slow this slipping time? And if we can’t, how do we fend off regret in its wake? The temptation to choose a path that feels convenient becomes more understandable the longer it’s on the table. The job or the place or the partner. But I think about what will sit on the shelf in my living room at 40, what my hands will look like at 50, and what I will remember about this moment, this year, this decade to come. What I will wish I had tried or savored or cherished, what I will wish I had held to and what I will wish I had let go, and what my life will look like as a result. 

I want to get older, and I want to feel fully, feel nurtured and complete as the years go by, that I was awake and alive every day. That my attention was paid to things I care about, that I saw regret as a warning that I heeded and that my life was one that I chose. That I followed my intuition and love, and that travel and taste and experience followed. And that I understood that intention doesn’t guarantee outcome, but that the liability is not to regret a lack of success, but to regret not having tried. 

I know there is struggle and pain that is inevitable, regret bound to find its way in over a lifetime in one way or another. But potential that wastes away, dreams that lie half lived out of fear, curiosity that dies unexplored under disillusionment, and regret that lingers under your own hand, all seem like pain multiplied. I don’t know how I would manage the weight of what ifs that were once within my control, how I would bear the ache of living a life I did not choose. And I’m driving down the coast, in the last year of my 20s, and what a burden, to live a life you did not choose when choice was yours for the taking.