As we age, our journeys inevitably branch to their unique undulations, the next no more worthy than the last. Some call it the accumulation of wisdom, while others deem it a progressive concatenation of nicks and bruises — none hopefully too melancholy nor daunting to leave an indelible mark.
I, on the other hand, call it as it is, which is they are one and the same.
Harkening back to early memories of who we wanted to become can be a tenuous exercise. Do we actually remember how we felt in adolescence? Have we projected our current conscious onto a past that is imaginative in the very literal sense that we can never relive it again? Confronting our past lives and past dreams can be harrowing, but remembering the agency we manifest with a snap of a finger can lift us off our feet to the top of the world.
From this vantage point, we can see our tiny past, present, and future selves scurrying about, obsessive with what frankly won’t matter in the end. Taking a step back to reconnect with our hearts may actually be the only key to true clarity. What clarity might mean to you will not distribute in a normalized or predictive fashion. And that’s okay. The beauty of the world is that we are each living our own little stories with the only author as he who holds the courage to take the next breath.
Now, courage can be fleeting, and I’ll be the first to admit. Some days, we just don’t feel like getting out of bed. And in a world geared for hyper-distraction, it is all too easy to rock our boats off course towards a foggy abyss. But approaching our lives as an arc that ebbs and flows, yet one that inflects upwards over time is critical to becoming who we always wanted to be.
So, who do you want to be? A noble with a court of jesters at her beckon? An entrepreneur whose toil is remembered for generations to come? Maybe someone who makes the best gobsmacking gruyere omelette for their boys on Sundays? Whatever your cause might be will uniquely define your personal charter, how you spend the precious minutes of each day, and how ultimately you sequence the many bets of your life.
There are many bets that we place throughout our lives, most inconsequential, yet some that there are no turning back from. Scampering through the crosswalk while yellow taxi engines rev does require innate internal calculus, but is a rush you will inevitably soon forget.
But other bets will stick with you forever. They may haunt you late at night as the rain taps against the windowsill, all alone. Others may spark a deep sense of joy from within that only you can describe. It’s upon just you to organize these bets and take action accordingly. For some, big bets may mean where they go to college. Whether they move across the country to start a new job and uproot everything that they had known to be true. Or, in the literal sense, putting it all on red. What may help create order from chaos is to project forward who you aspire your future self to be. Would your 80-year old self shake his head with disdain? Or laugh with pride about the person he has become after a life of these tiny little bets compounding, day in, day out, to no end.
In other words, regret minimization seems to be a powerful anchoring framework to coordinate our growth trajectories while we have our precious lives in front of us. Of course, not every bet taken will produce a concrete signal of validation. In many ways, the bets of our lives are modulo operations, always some tiny remainder of ambiguity looming over our heads.
The important lesson here, is to never shirk from the responsibility we owe ourselves to grow into who we’ve always wanted to become. Today’s the day to take the next bet of your life.
(written in August 2024)