There comes a time in every man’s life when he looks out at the world and says to himself:
“What the heck happened?”
It’s been one of those years.
I can remember one day, back when Mary Hannah was starting high school, that I sat down and calculated the number of years that it would be until I was done with this whole school thing. I must have been 11 years old, because I came up with seven. Seven whole years. I had no clue then how much can change in an instant, let alone an entire year, let alone almost a decade! I was young, and 11 was a great age to be.
When I was fourteen we moved to Nepal. It was supposed to be three years before I saw a sign in good English or walked the halls of a Walmart. I did the math: I was going to be 17 when we returned to America.
I am, coincidentally, 17 now.
Let me tell you, it’s not what I envisioned. For starters, I live in the South. That was not in the plan at all. At the end of this semester I will be 7.5% of the way through my degree, (I did the math), but the crazy thing is that it will be from a college I’d never even heard of when I was 11. I run a YouTube channel. I took the CLT, a test designed for homeschoolers that hadn’t even been invented when I calculated my years to graduation. My senior project is a documentary on homeschool graduates. (If you know one, please send them this link!)
The point is, I had no clue. I can look back these days and realize just how shallow my understanding of getting older was, how I didn’t understand just what it meant to grow up. At eleven I was as mature as I could get, at least in my own eyes. Now I look back at the things I did when I was thirteen and realize how stupid I was. I’m sorry, unsmart was the word my mom made me use back then, but I don’t have to be a genius to recognize stupidity when I see it.
We all look at our lives at some point and ask ourselves what happened. It’s just a question of where we go from there. We can sit and wonder what our life could have looked like, as I did for about an hour while writing this. That’s a fun thought experiment, but it’s not going to get you anywhere. Our job is to look at where we are, see how we got here, and then grow from it. Because you never know what the future holds. Whether you win the lottery, die, or go to the mall is a complete mystery to all of us, but there is one thing that is certain. Wondering about how our life could have been is not going to help us move ahead. Since forwards is the only way we can go, it seems silly to spend our lives looking backwards.
Doesn’t it?