Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

I wonder if I should have taken the one less traveled by.

If I weren’t sitting here right now, reflecting after a class at Teachers College and a long day at my desk at Columbia, I would have just returned from Spain, exhausted and exhilarated from a year of teaching English to 2nd graders and living in a rural, coastal town quietly distanced from the epicenter of this global financial meltdown.

It’s incredible to me how much single decisions shape our lives, and even more so how those decisions are rarely made on the impact they will have on our lives long-term. Instead, they are often made by prioritizing one tiny factor on which they hinge: a friend in town who we could always spend more time with, the immediate appeal of a higher salary, the weighing of two options when each should be considered independently, the fleeting priorities we think we will live by indefinitely. Our daily lives are defined by these individual components that we consider in isolation, though they collide in every moment to build the beginning and end of our days, the thoughts that preoccupy us before sleep, the frameworks with which we understand our purpose.

As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, I am one of the floaters. I do not have a predefined path or even a clear, distant end goal—instead I have diverse interests, competing priorities, and at times an inability to balance rational thinking with emotional investment. As a result, the individual factors of a decision play heavily in my selection; without a clearly defined purpose, I rely on the sub-components to understand my choices.

After graduating from college, I spent the following summer weighing two options: accept a one-year position with the Spanish government, imparting my native tongue on youngsters in a small town, or begin employment at a prestigious university in a global city, in a position requiring an ironically vague specialization and carrying an equally vague indication of where I could go from there. I picked the latter, partially because I thought that if I picked the former, I would spend the next summer engaging in a similar decision-making process, having spent a year doing something fun but not career-advancing, engaging but not necessarily skill-imparting. To prevent a wasted year, as it seemed at the time, I opted for the safer, more standard choice of immediate salaried employment in New York City.

I’m not sure what I thought would happen when I started this real life, full-time job. I couldn’t fathom being there for long, nor could I imagine where I might go next. After learning the ropes for a few weeks, I began to apply my old patterns of behavior to this new situation. I sought immediate advancement, rapid and incremental change, and new challenges. I scoured job postings without any sense of what I was looking for—I wanted significance, I wanted growth, I wanted a change of scene. I wanted agency over my own status. For a year and six months now, I have remained in this position, changing projects, acquiring new responsibilities, building relationships. I frequently wonder what my days would look like had I gone to Spain or taken a risk or chosen a challenge over safety. I look at the graduate program I’ve committed myself to, a spin-off of my job and an excuse for keeping it, and measure out the months until I’m through with this phase of my life. Yet in all these daydreams, in every calculation, the next destination remains unapparent.

Though I believe in the power of individuals to overcome obstacles and remedy effects of poor decisions, I’m cautious about this next one. Each step we take as young adults plunging forward into the world shapes and defines us—what happens if the next step poorly defines me? What if I place too much weight on the individual pieces of a decision without understanding the greater implications? What if I’m unable to holistically, strategically, wholeheartedly understand what I truly want to do?