Turning Out OK?

Visiting a long-ago place is enticing. Was enticing. Still is, but I gave in to the urge and visited the long-ago place. That was the trip we recently took to western Massachusetts, the Berkshire Hills and Pittsfield.

A niggling feeling has been with me about this trip for some time. This morning I got a peek at what part of that feeling is/was.

I remember how I felt during those Pittsfield days. Unsure of myself. Growing up and becoming more of an adult. Not quite there but getting closer every day. Not certain what my life would become, but I wondered about it. Before high school graduation and before college years, I hoped for a strong academic experience and a great job thereafter. I tried to imagine the work I would do, the industry I would commit to, and a whole lot of other things that would come with those experiences.

Many scenarios flashed through my brain. Of course, I knew this was all guess work and what-if, but I toiled at it over and over again. You too? Is this part of maturing? Does everyone go through these experiences?

Getting back to the trip, I recalled then and now a sense of completion. That OK feeling one gets when they know things turned out alright. Results could have been different, but all in all, life was good and meaningful. There was a use and purpose to my life. Not what I expected, but still good.

So I wondered about this some more. Did I turn out OK? Was all that worry and guessing in early years for nought? Of all the outcomes that could have been, did the ones I lived measure up to expectations, dreams, hopes?

I have worked with many people over the years, many of those young and seeking their futures. They asked for guidance. They wanted to know their options before committing to one path or another. I tried to tell them the paths are unknown and so are the options. The future is an endless funnel of opportunities, some related, others not. Trying to piece these things together in some sensible pattern is folly. My advice in the long run was for them to get in touch with their passions and seek work that dealt with them.

When something makes sense – an outcome is not only desirable, but the actions that build toward it become logical and possible – one follows that something. If true to the passion, that something makes its own path forward to the truth that is meaningful for you and the others you want to work with, help, whatever.

This is situational imperative. It is experienced and recognized as it happens. It usually is not anticipated let alone articulated. No, clarity about the future is mostly absent.

But my remembering is calling up a sense of completion and purpose. I have played toward my passions. I have enjoyed my life’s work. I have been successful enough at it to have supported my life and that of my family’s life. We did not live lives of severe want, but we didn’t have everything we thought we wanted. In the end we got what we needed, and it made for a good life. The people I worked to help also seem to have benefitted. I truly get the sense that things did turn out OK.

And now, in the autumn of my years, I really don’t need to strive for more. It comes, of course. One doesn’t strive as much as continue to do for others that makes sense to you. The OK feeling is present in that work. It resonates with the earlier memories.

I think it’s OK. I’m OK. I feel it. The trip seems to be saying it is so.

December 6, 2023

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