º£½ÇÉçÇø

I can do whatever I want. I don’t like to admit this to myself, but it’s always been this way. My parents, to my teenage self’s great frustration, never urged me toward one particular career path over another. Now, the only thing stopping me from dropping everything and enrolling in clown school or registering for the law school admission test is my aversion to taking on even more student loan debt. It also wouldn’t be wise to quit my job and book a month-long, all-inclusive trip to Bora Bora entirely on my credit card. But possible? Terrifyingly so. Paradoxically, ruminating on all my free will and privilege burrows a pit in my stomach. Planning is nothing until you live the plan. If I can do anything, why did I choose this life?

Most days, I feel content with the life I’ve stumbled into in Vancouver, B.C., teaching high school English and writing . That is until I envision the infinite experiences I haven’t had and the roads I’ve not taken, dwarfing my singular, puny life. In “Gwynfinite Jest,” an essay included in the , Geoff Moysa, ’02 BA, ’03 MA, describes the imagined possibilities of his life just as I imagine my own: “a self-created labyrinth of branches that never stopped multiplying, a central station leading to different destinations, all existing simultaneously.”

In 2021, Sarah Chan, ’03 BA, and Jhenifer Pabillano, ’04 BA, brought together other Gateway alumni to contribute to Midlife, a collection of essays exploring the theme of getting older. Flipping through the book brings that labyrinth to life. The writers share an origin story that intersects with the others’ at the doors of the student newspaper office. From there, their paths diverge. They become authors and journalists, construction workers and parents, lawyers and business people. One of them, Don Iveson, ’01 BA, becomes the 35th mayor of Edmonton.

I imagine that the student newspaper experience is to an arts kid what student clubs are to engineering kids. I clearly remember the first time I walked through the Gateway doors. I was 17 and too intimidated by the cool editors to imagine that they’d soon invite me to hang out with them at RATT. I had no idea that I was about to make friends who are now, 13 years later, the people I consider my chosen family—no idea that this was the definitive moment my writing career began.

Reflecting on this formative period of my life brings the labyrinth back into view, often with a series of questions. Could I have been a more virtuous person if I had chosen any other room to walk into that day? Could I have become a richer or happier person if I’d stayed home from RATT and studied for that LSAT? I long to return to these moments before I knew what was going to happen next.

In his book, , David Berry, ’07 BA, describes our longing for the past as a distinctly modern condition, a stabilizing response to the self-conscious flux of our time. Never before have people had so many options, real or imagined, for what we could do with our lives. Never before have we had so many reminders of the countless past versions of ourselves. Thanks, Facebook.

While re-reading the book recently, I came across a passage I had previously highlighted. “Nostalgia is a form of reconciliation,” Berry writes, explaining how nostalgia offers coherence between who we are and who we once were. This idea precedes a line I scribbled a star beside: “It helps us believe we might be more than just this longing.”

Looking at this page now, I can see my annotation as a kind of wish. I want to be more than this longing, more than someone who spends time ruminating on possible outcomes rather than actually experiencing events before they become memories. A helpful place to start is viewing my past experiences not as potential glitches in elaborate machines, but as anchors: confirmation that I have been alive.

Growing up, I was haunted by a truism, usually doled out by adults in response to my ceaseless ramblings about what I had so far become and might still become. “It is what it is,” they’d say, dismissing all the unexplored what-ifs and whys on my life’s path. If I interrogated each possible branch of the labyrinth, perhaps I could be sure that I had made the right choices after all.

I now know this to be true: if possibility is endless, our experiences are the only things that are real. Everything I experience today matters, because it’s all that I’ll ever have; one day, I’ll probably even feel nostalgic about it. The idea is so simple that it’s almost unbelievable—I just had to live a little bit longer to believe it myself.