I will be a university graduate within the next few months, and the motion sickness that comes with change has already begun setting in. The next few years are what we call the “panic years”, and they have a way of being all-consuming, and also hellaciously good at making you feel like maybe you’re not as ready as you thought you were. More times than I can count I wanted the comfort of knowing exactly what my next steps would be. I wanted a comfortable and perfect little safety net that would catch me, protecting me from the unknown. Only now, at 23-years-old, I’ve come to accept—and more than that, embrace—the not knowing part of things.
I love “maybes”, but a much younger version of myself used to hate them. As a child, when I would ask my parents for something and they would say “maybe”, it always felt like it was never truly an honest answer. And of course, when you’re a child, your parents have wisdom beyond your own, and more often than not they probably had good reasons for saying “no” but didn’t because they were shielding us from the truth.
It’s strange to say that I’m now the adult. I don’t feel like it, and in the context of living the life that I know I want, “maybes” have shifted from something that I once considered a colossal dishonesty to something I’ve come to embrace with open arms. Â
I heard a story recently from someone named Liam Oce, and I think it explains “maybes” beautifully: Nearly a year ago, Audrey and Mara, roommates, decidedly did not make New Year’s resolutions but instead made bingo cards. Although the two girls were both young 20-somethings, fresh out of university, and the perfect candidates for hustle culture to be pushed upon, they said “no thanks, we’re okay, we’re not in a rush”.
Both girls decided to fall in love with “maybes”. They said, “maybe we’ll move once our lease ends, and maybe I’ll run a 15k this year, and maybe we’ll travel to a new country, and maybe I’ll be accepted into grad school, and maybe all these things will line up in arbitrary ways, and just maybe we’ll say bingo to ourselves in the mirror one afternoon. Or maybe, none of that will happen.” They said, “maybe we won’t move out or start new jobs this year, but at least we won’t pretend that we don’t already love ourselves enough to understand that progress isn’t linear and that sometimes healing is slow, and if we have to take a little bit of our savings out this year we won’t feel like failures”.
Audrey and Mara felt that a bingo card for the year is the fruity drink you order at the bar because you’re tired of pretending you enjoy the taste of New Year’s resolutions. It was a testament to the fact that your 20s are a revolving door of losing yourself and finding yourself again, and never being quite sure of how or when.
Optimistic nihilism and maybes hold hands. Its essence being the capacity of an individual to construct their own meaning, after coming to terms with the fact that the universe is largely meaningless. And not in way that’s saying nothing in this life can have meaning, but rather saying we could remove the pressures if we wanted to.
The thing is, there is nowhere you’re supposed to be. You’re not late. You’re right on time. There is nothing you have to do, no path you have to follow, nothing that has to be measured. We get so caught up in this race to the finish line that the majority of us forget we’re there. Forgetting that a life unscripted, a life full of “maybes”, can mean a life that is rich in experiences and happiness and freedom from the preconceived notions and expectations we all know too well.
Oscar Wilde once said that if you know exactly what you want to be in life: a lawyer, a teacher, an accountant, you will become it, and that is your punishment. He believed that actually not knowing what you want to be, not becoming a noun or a verb, reinventing yourself every day, to be constantly moving in this lifetime, and unfixed by privilege, is a lovely way to live. That’s not to say that there can’t be beauty in familiarity, as we get older it becomes easy to be drawn to reliability, and the comforts of ordinary life. That’s okay too. The whole idea is that whatever life you wish to lead, embrace the “maybes” because not a single thing is certain, and maybe we could try to let that make it all a little more beautiful.
So maybe Audrey and Mara did move out. Maybe Audrey did start a new job, maybe Mara did get into grad school, and just maybe they both got bingos. And if they didn’t?
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