For as long as I can remember, my dad has been telling me “there is no magic age where you become an adult. At the age of 61, I still don’t know if I’m an adult.” Nevertheless, I have been waiting in vain for a magic epiphany; the moment of clarity where I not only know precisely where I stand but also where I am going. Even though I was forewarned, some small part of me expected Chile to give me exactly that.
As another season passes and signs of Spring emerge, a lot of my friends are making concrete plans that include fancy jobs, graduate schools, big cities, and more traveling for their futures. Simply put, they know (or are at least pretending to know) what they are doing after this Chilean adventure comes to its grand finale. In all honesty, I don’t want to compare myself to them or feel pressured to map out my life, because I am not them. (If anything, I more often relate to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. He has high expectations placed on him, yet his anxious pseudo-bohemian soul rebels after college because he's in search of something more profound, outside the typical life.)
I am determined to take the road EVEN less traveled that is paved by me and me alone. But some part of me can’t help but wonder and at times obsess about the unwritten future, as I am pummeled with anxiety-inducing questions about my next step .
As I think about where the endless numbered days have gone and where I am head so many questions surface: what have I learned; have I been a good teacher; have I made the most of this experience; am I making progress as an individual; will I fall back into old habits; where have I been and where in the world am I going?
I don’t feel lost as I w(o/a)nder, and I don’t feel found. If anything I feel like Chile has brought me to the lost and found. Being here has allowed me to learn, change, grow, and become infinitely more self-aware and feel more alive than I would have in the US within this allotted time…so in that way I feel more found than I did at the beginning. But I am lost (and at a loss of words) because I can’t articulate those lessons, though I know between thought and expression lies a lifetime. So taciturnly, I find myself ruminating about the ‘lost and found’ or the grey, in-between place where I regularly find myself residing. I just have to regularly remind myself that it’s okay not to know, because there is no magic adult age, and there will never be a magic life plan. I will continue to make things up as I go along. I wouldn’t want to live with clairvoyant visions anyways. Some people dream about buying an Audi, some dream about a life in academia, others dreams about a weekend trip to the beach, and I dream about the process of ambitiously traveling…not only to foreign countries but to a place where I’m evolving, giving freely of myself, experiencing, fearlessly loving, pursing happiness, and making the most of my time in whatever crazy situation that I indubitably will find myself in.
With that dream and goal, I do not want to sound overly romantic, idealist, or naive about my freedom/future , because I am well aware that I am still living the finite dreams of a 20-something year old. Miranda July aptly explained life’s phases: ‘It’s kind of about letting go of that feeling of my 20s, that feeling that I will do absolutely everything, I will have sex with everyone, I will go to every country,’ she says. ‘In your 30s, it’s obvious that a finite amount of things will happen.’ [Then] ‘We’ll be 40 in five years.’ [Next] “Forty is basically 50. And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.’ And then the mid-life crisis often comes brought on by mortality terror.At time same time, I refuse to give in to those stereotypes without a wholehearted attempt to follow my dreams.
"we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" T.S Eliot
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