'You have to choose your life'
A message mostly for myself — but I hope for you too
My message to you is simple: you have to choose your life.
A life spent in indecision — Do I choose this partner? Should I live in this city? Should I try this work? — is not a life lived at all.
The doing matters more than the imagining.
I love this image above, “The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage” by Degas. It makes me think of all the painstaking time and energy and thought we put to getting things right — as if our life is a grand show. But of course as you and I and all of us know, there isn’t any dress rehearsal; there isn’t any ‘getting things right’ or ‘nailing the performance.’
There is only the doing, only the here and now.
On the surface, to not choose feels like freedom. ‘If I keep analyzing my options, I’ll eventually get to a place that’s best for me,’ you tell yourself. What you don’t realizing is that you’re living in paralysis and missing the fullness of life.
This is one of the paradoxes I’ve experienced over the last few years as a digital nomad. I once felt as if I could “try on” as many lives as possible, I’d know what is best for me. I would know what to choose. This has looked like many things: the corporate life in NYC, the short summer stint in Colorado, the writer in London/freelancer in Europe, the beach bum (still yet to try this one!)
I have a quite elaborate — albeit unrealistic — dream. I envision a life on the California coast where I can take my golden retrievers to the beach every day. I can’t tell you how I’d get the money to afford this lifestyle, but that is a minor detail. I can imagine living in sunny blissfulness every day, and saying goodbye to dreadful winters, which I never really like. I feel a sense of ease in life.
On first thought, I want all of these experiences to have a full life. If not, I’m missing out right?
With every experience I’vve had, it’s led me to the realization there are infinate amount of other lives to be led.
It’s the scope creep effect. Once you try a few lives, you keep wanting to try more. Aka you’re never satisfied. (Any Midnight Library readers here?!)
I began to feel trapped. Saying yes to one thing meant saying no to all the rest. But I dug deeper to discover a seed of fear. Fear about choosing wrong. Fear of regret.
What if 29 years from now I want something different? What if I wished I never left New York? What if I wake up with the wrong person? What if I’m miserable?
(Side note: The good thing about knowing a problem is that you can confront in head on)
Let’s play an exercise here. If you were to look at some of the major decisions you made over the past 10 years — and look at the outcome.
Did you know the effect of your decision to pick a college or the first job? What about the trickle down impacts? Of course, you could never have forseen all of the twists and turns one decision could take. And while we can accept that for past decisions, why is it so hard to think this way when examining a current decision to make?
I also want to explain a shift in my heart and my thinking that’s had a profound impact in how I think about big decisions.
What about the beauty of choosing your life?
Of saying yes to this person, this place, this moment in time. Acknowledging the twists and turns that this could take, most that you have no control over. What could happen when embracing the full of the. experience right now?
We can never fully know the outcome of any one decision. It’s a lie to think we have control over this. We can only do our best in the here and now and honor ourselves. To trust that we know ourselves enough to listen to our gut.
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig writes:
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
I’ve since found an unexpected peace in the idea of settling down, of commitment, of choosing a place/person. Though this is not something you’ll see glamorized in the digital nomad community. (Why would you want to limit yourself like that? I hear the voice in my head say.)
For one, it gives me my agency back. I’m the curator of my life and can make it what I want.
But most importantly, one life lived fully is better than an infinite amount of imagined ones.
As Natasha Lunn writes in Conversations on Love — only you can give meaning to your choice.
“The important thing, she explained, was not to make the ‘right’ or ‘best’ decision, but ‘to closely bind yourself to whatever you’re living’. She said, ‘You make your life meaningful by applying meaning to it – it’s not just inevitably meaningful as a result of the choices you’ve made.’ We were discussing this in the context of choice, but I think it applies to circumstance too. The romantic relationship or family I wanted would not make my life meaningful; only I could.”