Late to Life

I had a job interview yesterday.  This is my last "college summer."  The last time I have to scramble for summer employment before impending fall classes engulf my time wholesale.  This time next year I'll be graduating and flying top speed into the workforce.  But now, as my graduation date approaches ever... so... slowly... I feel kind of stuck.

Truth is, I got a late start on life.

I graduated from high school younger than most - a respectable 17 years old, with plenty of opportunity to get a head start in college.  However, I had made other plans. As is common practice in my faith, I chose to devote two years of my life to preach, teach, and volunteer in an assigned location.  I'll write more about my experiences volunteering as a missionary in another post, but suffice it to say, my two years abroad, combined with the year and a half I took to save for my mission (yes, we pay our own way whenever possible) essentially destroyed any semblance of a head start.

Most of my peers in my graduating class of 2007 were finishing college when I was registering for my freshman year.  I try not to make comparisons, every life takes a different path.  But it's difficult not to feel behind somehow.

My interview didn't help.  This was a nice place offering a great job.  I pray I land the position, I would love to work there and it would give me tons of career-applicable experience.  Plus, it feels like a job.  I walked into the office building, greeted by the brooding stare of a burly security guard and the dazzlingly hygienic smile of a pleasant, blonde receptionist. A welcome equal parts intimidating and inviting, I was already overwhelmed.  The cavernous lobby lined with plasma screens and crisply printed promotional materials didn't help to quell my nerves either.

All the glass-paned, polished ambiance of professionalism brought those gnawing doubts hurtling back to me.  I was supposed to get a head start, I graduated young!  I could be 3 years into a career now instead of juggling part-time jobs (no one offers full-time if they can avoid giving health insurance benefits). I could have a bachelor's, an MBA, and be starting my own business instead of fenagling my class schedule so that I don't overwhelm myself again with 18 credits a semester.  I could be climbing the corporate ladder and watching my financial portfolio diversify rather than blindly searching for professors' soft spots and catering my design portfolio to their tastes.  I could move on from the "school game" and finally get my hands dirty.

Here, in the opulence of this lobby, was a taste of the life I was missing out on.  This was where I could have been 3 years ago, a successful, industrious provider. Someone my wife could rely on to cover expenses while she prepares for grad school.  Someone to alleviate pressure from her end and allow her to focus entirely on her studies. The key to happiness.  The solution.  The life of professional ambition, of career planning, of weekends and summer trips and Saturdays spent with my wife instead of my homework.

But I shouldn't regret my choice to volunteer.  I met wonderful people, saw foreign lands, learned a strange language, and expanded my horizons in ways college couldn't accomplish (and hasn't). Perhaps most importantly, I met my wife there, on the other side of the world.  It was a wonderful, enriching experience and I wouldn't trade it for the world, let alone a head start in the job market.

The coulds and insteads and rathers of life can drown you in a flood of woulda-coulda-shoulda.  The fact is, that life, the life you're missing out on, the life you pine after - it will always be there.  It's ambition's great mirage.

Timing has nothing to do with it.  Education and career happen in their own time, at their own pace.  I know a man who is a successful provider, husband and father who never went to college.  I have a friend who's been all over the world doing volunteer work after graduating from college; he's home and currently works at Starbucks.  Another friend of mine graduated the same year I did and is still taking writing classes as he prepares to compose what I fully expect will be the great American novel. Some end up in the CEO's chair. Others choose to stay home with the kids (and not just the mothers; stay-at-home dads are out there working hard, too).  Regardless of what your life's timeline is, I think as long as your moving forward, you're on the right track.

Maybe I'm not late after all.  I just took the scenic route.


S