The Price of Bliss
February 15, 2020

     And you don't need to know everything about what you're going to do before you do it.  In fact, you can't know everything about what you're going to do before you do it.  Not possible.  So don't let that stop you.

     Furthermore, if you did know everything about what you were going to do before you did it, you almost certainly would not go through with it.  Doing amazing things that stretch you beyond your known limits is hard – really hard – sometimes.  And scary as hell.   And boring.  It's true – amazing endeavors in life often (usually) involve long stretches of mind-numbing tedium.  What's the old saw about war?  "War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror."  Yeah, it's a lot like that, except sometimes you get to swap out the moments of sheer terror for a few moments of sheer bliss.  Sometimes.

     So if you knew in advance just how hard and scary and boring your adventures were going to be much of the time, you almost certainly wouldn't set out on them in the first place.  But then you'd miss the bliss.

 * * *

     If I had known anything about the Ivy League before I went, there's a good chance I wouldn't have applied to Harvard at all.  It wasn't until I started traveling with the Women's Basketball team, as the team manager, in the fall of my junior year, that I even visited the other Ivies – and realized that Dartmouth or Cornell probably would have won me over, if I had known about them and had been accepted by those schools as well.  What, with the cozy, poetic romance of Hanover, New Hampshire, and the ghost of Robert Frost glistening in the snowflakes and rustling in the evergreens, Dartmouth would have been my first choice, no doubt.  And Cornell, with its robust agricultural and outdoor education programs, would likely have come in a close second.  Each of those places would have fit far more neatly into the narrative I had going for myself when I was 18 – and thus might not have stretched my narrative as much as Harvard did.  

    Not that there is a thing in the world wrong with either Dartmouth or Cornell.  They are ridiculously fabulous schools, and it would have been a privilege of the highest order to attend them.  Hell, from a historical perspective, the fact that I was heading to college anywhere, as a young woman of lower middle-class means, constituted a privilege that bordered on the miraculous – one that almost certainly would not have been possible for someone like me as little as four or five decades earlier.  

      So don't get me wrong.  I'm not knocking Dartmouth and Cornell.  I would never want to knock anyone's choice of college – or for that matter, anyone's choice of any endeavors undertaken to expand, extend, and enlarge their ability to bring gifts into the world.  Whether you do it through formal higher education or by any of an infinite number of other paths, the expansion's the thing, and the extension, and the enlargement of the scope of yourself.  

     Know first that your best self and your best life probably lie somewhere out on the margins of your current self – or beyond them – so you might not find your bests if you play it too safe.  Know next that it can be hard and scary and sometimes really boring out there too.  Such is the price of bliss.