TOW: Life Phases

You know, I had a really good talk with my friend Robert last night.  We talked a lot about life phases, and about how things were changing for both us, mostly for the better.  I mentioned that my life had taken a lot of turns in the last four years, and it seems to me that things are finally starting to be where I imagined that they would be when I first started down this new career path idea.  It only took four years for me to get there!  Er, yay, I guess?


I think it's more that there's so much adjusting to do when you move to a new city, take up a new life, new friends, new challenges, new problems of a variety of kinds.  What's interesting to me is that I seem to go through Life Phases, where I repeat things over and over again.  I've managed, in my mind, to repeat several life phases, go through several of the same problems I've had in the past, but I've repeated them in the future. Why is that?  Shouldn't I have learned my lesson the first time?

Instead of quoting a philosopher, I think the answer is much simpler than that.  The challenges you face as a youth, as someone still growing into life are not the same as the challenges you face as an adult.  No matter if you've faced a problem a million times as a child, as a teen, as anything other than someone who is really striving to become themselves as they grow older, you won't be able to apply the same solutions to your childhood problems that you did when you were a kid.  When you were a kid, your parents may have bailed you out at the last minute if you did something really stupid.  Maybe it was your friends as someone in your young twenties.  But as people get more insular in their older ages, there's not a lot of support.  There's you, maybe there's your spouse, but really, there's you.  Just you.  You and your life.  And you have to decide how to live it.

Being an adult is hard.  It's not easy to do new things as an adult.  When you were younger, safety nets existed to catch you when you fell.  What you realize as an adult, is that some of those safety nets have disappeared, but there's still a crowd of onlookers, watching to see if you'll fall. 

I'd like to think that my life will eventually be less of a tragic fall from above and more of a direct path towards the other side of the goals I'm seeking.  I'm sure most people feel the same way.