Shut Up and Ride
Lindsey Donner is the owner of Well Versed Creative, a design and editorial consultancy. She is also the Lifestyle Editor for iGrad, an online startup that provides tools for recent college graduates. You can read more on her blog, Use Your Words, or follow her on Twitter @lindsey_donner.
journey (noun): “an act of traveling from one place to another.”
Applied in the figurative sense – which is the sense mostly meant on this blog – you’re supposed to infer that a journey, wherever it begins, has a beginning, a middle, and presumably, an end.
© 2010 Lindsey Donner. All rights reserved.
But this begs the question, what are we expecting to find there, at the end? Who’s behind the wheel? And will anybody read my Tweets in the Library of Congress when I die?
… Anyone?
The motion-bound anxiety of socially conscious Gen Y-ers to scramble ahead and find out the answer often leaves me slightly dizzy.
Then again, I’m not a huge fan of the Gen Y epithet. I have no doubt we all share qualities thanks to our birth year, to the generationally specific experiences and perceptions of our parents and grandparents – but mostly, I don’t like it anymore than Gen X liked their epithet. (Have you seen Reality Bites?)
After 22 years of straight A’s and lonely writing, not having found much to enjoy in any of the usual claptrap, I found the apparently agonizing responsibility of adulthood to be an unexpected pleasure.
For the first time, there was no one to please but myself. No curfew. No exam. Just the endless possibility of the present tense.
I suppose you’re wondering what I have to show for all this talk. What have I done that’s so great?
I moved around; I worked hard. I did as I pleased. I taught myself to cook, in a galley kitchen in Brooklyn; I learned to make perfect chilaquiles verdes for my slavering husband in our house in Cabo San Lucas. I edited a newspaper. I wore my hair short and very, very long. I got married looking out over the Manhattan Bridge. I adopted cats.
I camped on empty beaches, nudged awake by the glitter of the Baja sunrise. I started my own creative consultancy. I worked late into the night, for terrible bosses and incredible ones; I worked late into the night for me. I woke early. I slept in. I read poems out loud, for inspiration. I bought a bike. I stuck my toes into Mag Bay and laughed at the shock of cold water. I ate a sandwich looking at the San Diego skyline.
In short, if this is indeed a journey, I’m really starting to enjoy it now, more than ever – at 26. I look forward to feeling the same way in 5, 10, 15, and if I’m lucky, 50 years from today.
Because I can keep a budget, and because I put my work first and my pleasure a very close second, there’s nothing I really want that I have not found some way to accomplish. I find that if I own my work and my play equally, if I take charge of both, life gives me much to enjoy in return for the sweat on my brow.
Adulthood is much more than the sum of its parts.
And the journey?
The journey is not the point, folks. The journey is the ride. It’s the rollercoaster, and you’re on it.
So take a look around. Scream or vomit or throw up your hands in exhilaration – but pause for a moment. Look around you. The work of your parents and teachers and caretakers has gotten you this far.
The rest is, incredibly, up to you.
© 2010 Lindsey Donner. All rights reserved.
Related posts:
Loading ...