Like many people, when I was in college, I had a plan in my mind as to how my life was supposed to unfold. It was predictable if not cliche. I would graduate from college, start a career, get married, buy a house and have a bunch of kids. Each step being a large checkmark on my to-do list of life. Check, check, check... Each successive accomplishment being met with less a feeling of achievement and more of an impatient push to the next box that needed checking. My early adulthood was more about blind striving than it was about true enjoyment, patient discernment, or thoughtful reflection.
This is how it is for many in our culture. We follow the narrative that was contrived for us and sold to us. Not that this is a bad thing. Expectations for how people should lead their lives allows for communities to form and cultures to remain relatively stable. A good thing.
A problem arises, however, when all the check boxes are filled. Degrees are earned, vows are exchanged, mortgages are signed and families are completed.
Then what?
The narrative ends.
I suppose investment firms make arguments that one must save for one's retirement. So keep working and invest in that IRA!
Then what?
The narrative ends.
In our culture you are as good as dead or at least obsolete.
I think this dead-end cultural narrative is what insights many a mid-life crisis. Good for sales of Corvettes and cosmetic surgery, yet maybe not so good for sustained happiness. Even if a full blown mid-life crisis doesn't ensue, our cultural dead-end narrative definitely nets a phenomena of middle aged people floundering about in almost an adolescent-like state (myself included). Oh, what to do now that all my boxes are checked? The only natural indicator being to go back to the start, to one's adolescence when we are still emerging into ourselves. We grasp for answers in the way we did in our youth and when we find none, we numb out or act out. Alcohol, shopping, gambling, extra marital affairs, the list goes on.
This summer while I walked through Ireland I was happy to partially find an inroad to the next chapter in my narrative. It is simple really, I discovered that at this point I don't have to do anything. As in I don't need any checkmarks or to-do lists for my life. I can wait and see what comes. It is okay for me to not have a grand plan because I trust something will come or maybe it won't, and that's okay too. I know this seems counter culture but the nice thing about having all my previous boxes checked and having successfully completed the cultural narrative is that now I can create my own story as it comes.
And all I have to do is wait.
