I don’t know about other people, but being an adult isn’t what I expected it to be. Like Calvin’s dad in the comic, I too just imagined that once I grew up I’d just automatically know how to behave like a proper adult. But now that I have finally become an adult, I realize… it doesn’t work that way. Transitions in life don’t happen so smoothly. A lot of things are ad-libbed and learnt along the way.
One of the biggest changes is in decision making. When you’re a kid, you have all the decisions made for you. Your job was either to comply or kick a fuss. But one way or another, you had no say in the matter. When we finally get into our teens, one of the earliest things we try to do is wrestle control of our lives away from our parents into our own hands. Be it smoothly or through a lot of struggles, our parents do eventually let go for us to run our own life. Suddenly, they don’t tell us what to do anymore. Suddenly, they go along with whatever we want. Suddenly, we have to make our own decisions. For a while there, it’s nothing short of liberating. You run your own life, you are in charge, you do whatever you like. And then you realize it’s not so easy.
There are so many decisions to make in life… many of them literally life changing. Where to work, where to live, where to settle down, what job to do, what career to choose, how to spend your money, who to date, when to get married, how much to save, what to believe, where to go, how you travel, what to buy... Everything calls for a decision to be made, and you feel the pressure of making the right decision for yourself… because as much as the decision is yours, so are the consequences.
Over the last few months, I’ve had so many conversations with so many of my closest friends, over what they want to do in life, their career path, their love lives, their beliefs… and the thing I see is that we’re all making life decisions as an complete independent adult for the first time in our lives… and surprisingly, we even now as full grown adults with none of that hormonal imbalance as an excuse, we don’t always know what to do.
I felt like I needed some advice the other day, and I spoke to my father hoping for some sort of fatherly guidance on what to do. I felt like perhaps he could give me a nugget of wisdom or insight, having lived twice as long as I have and all…. But surprisingly, what he said to me was “Follow your gut instinct. Do what you feel is right.”…….. and I fell silent.
I wondered if he was just side stepping the question or was he truly trying to tell me something about making decisions in life. I was turning to him to give me a yes or no, right or wrong. But in the end, he still threw the ball back at me asking me to use my own wit and judgement. I guess it was his way of reminding me that I was an adult now.
I guess it’s scary in this way; when you’re a kid and you don’t know the right answer to something, you know at the back of your mind that SOMEONE has it. Either the teacher, or your parents, or next door neighbour or that smart kid from class. There is someone you can turn to who can give you the right answer. But when you’re an adult, you learn that there is no such thing as the right answer to everything. There is only decisions and consequences. And it’s up to you to make the best decisions to get the most desired consequences. Your friends and family are still there to support you,
but even they don’t have all the answers anymore.
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