The Life I Never Lost
LIFE WRITING@ WORDHOUSEPERSONAL
Career regret, finding your passion, the search for fulfilling work are questions that often return in old age. We look back at the jobs we held, the careers we did not pursue, the opportunities we passed up, and the passions we never found, and wonder whether we could have lived differently. But sometimes what troubles us in old age is not the life we lost, but the life we imagined and never had.
Regretting the Mundane
A particular kind of regret pokes at my mundane elderly moments. Thinking back over the years nags at me about whether I should have done something different.
I stayed in the same job for over a decade, showing up every morning, lesson planning, meeting the students, but I shied away from academic pressures like pursuing a doctorate to prop up my professorial rank, earn Scopus points, publish research, and keep climbing the academic ladder. Instead, I kept to the plain routine: showing up in my classes, preparing my lesson plans, performing the professor. I never loved the work. I was never passionate about it. I never had that moment of thinking, this is what I was born to do. After a decade, I retired. A thought blisters my reverie: Did I waste a decade of my life?
One of the unfair questions in old age is this: pounding the actual life we lived against the imaginary life we craved—the career we hoped we had, the doctorate we might have earned, the research we might have published, and the book or books I could have written and published with the skills granted to me by Divine grace.
But how did I imagine my life? It was never really a career for me, but a lifestyle that spelled out comfort in prosperity. I imagined a spacious home, a good view of the sea and sky, an easy coming and going, and the savours of a perfect home. The actual life, of course, was lived in cramped spaces. It paid the bills, dodged obligations, braved disappointments, settled for compromises, hurdled commutes, met family needs, avoided workplace politics, and glossed over the everyday ordinariness of living.
Finding the Passion, Doing What We Love Most
How to choose a fulfilling career in our youth, or to have that choice and liberty at all, is a beautiful idea. But after graduation from college, a job was something to land, a way to earn back what my parents had spent on my education. Work wasn’t a privileged choice for what could fulfill an imagined future life scenario. What mattered with urgency was getting a work ID, having an identity attached to a workplace, and knowing that every month there would be a salary. A bonus if your interests at least matched the job. Usually, a career simply began, and often, its trajectory was not set by a love affair between what you were tasked to do and what you wanted to do, or thought you knew you wanted to do. The salary spelled out a dignity that often didn’t match the effort and energy.
This teacher taught literature and art appreciation. Patiently, she prepared her lessons, entered the classroom, and tried to make the lesson matter to young people, even if there was never a consuming love for the profession itself. It was a challenge to believe, all the time, that literature or the arts mattered in the bigger scheme of things. Over the years, the paycheck seemed to grow smaller against the effort required to earn it.
Living Outside the Job
I never allowed an occupation to headline my entire life. I was a medical representative, a high school teacher, a university professor, a book editor. I have five decades of work across these fields, but my imagined life remained imaginary. Much of those hours were a monotonous plateau that taught patience, discipline, endurance, responsibility, and dependability. Many days of often-unloved routine, and the unhappening of the dream life, brought wisdom that can withstand the dire probabilities of the present. In each vocation, I was in a formative season of becoming.
Instead of asking, “What career should I have chosen?” a better question waits up: “What can I still give?” Teaching in a university for a decade opened my mind to secular philosophies, creative literary inquiry, and psychological sparring with students. I never pursued any grand egoistic achievement. I simply showed up each day, overcoming timidity. I did the best I could, and was unfazed even with poor student evaluations.
Now is a new season, but I cannot spend my retirement years recovering an imaginary life or making up for every road I did not take. There are new compromises to make, new ordinary acts of showing up, and new straight lines to follow. Why fight the calm monotony? This is the carefree letting go that comes with age, the freedom from having to turn every day into an achievement or every interest into a passion. I am ever more free to care less about finding the passion I never had, or grieving over a life that existed only in imagination. What was never mine to begin with cannot really be lost.
A different way of Looking Back: Consider your past job, relationship, home, or season of life you once considered a compromise. What did it give you that your imagined life could never have given you?
