Paths Not Taken

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."

--Douglas Adams

From the age of about seven through my teens, I fit in much better with adults than I ever did with kids my own age. Friendships were rare and exquisite things, like priceless figurines in a china shop, and I either handled them with kid gloves or inadvertently bulled around smashing them to smithereens. The sort of easy camaraderie I observed in my schoolmates proved elusive; it was much simpler to retreat into my bookish world, where characters were two-dimensional and predictable.

With a few cherished exceptions, this state of affairs persisted well after I crossed the threshold of adulthood. In my secret heart, I believed that anyone who would befriend me was obviously at least mildly crazy. They had to be: look at how most of the "normal" people treated me.

It's passing strange that now, at 38 years of age, I should find myself fitting in better with people in their late teens and early twenties than I do with most of my peers at work. In fact, one of the biggest benefits of working where I do is that it allows me to have, more or less, the teenage experience I more or less missed out on the first time around.

There's a guy I work with, name of Justin, who--trust me--is going to go a long, long way in life. He is the total antithesis of what I was at his age. For one thing, he's got a schedule that a CEO would quail at, except Justin's schedule involves playing, coaching and refereeing multiple sports...often multiple teams within the same sport. He's made the provincials on two separate teams in ball hockey, for instance, necessitating a difficult decision as to which team will be graced with his presence. A couple of weeks ago, he played in a baseball tourney: his team, the Loaded Bats, won. He's also coaching a kids' soccer team. All this while creating and reffing a ball-hockey league (for which he enlisted me as timekeeper), working two jobs, and maintaining a social life to rival my dad's.

He's twenty one years old and probably the most genuine "people-person" I have ever met. Never mind the sky: there are no limits for people like him, and the most amazing thing about him is that he doesn't seem to understand or believe this.

One day not long ago, I asked him if he had any regrets in his life. Yes, it turned out he did. He wished that he had concentrated all his energies on one sport instead of ten and became an Olympian and world champion. I told him that at his age, this was still possible, if he really wanted it...but he shouldn't by any means regret the path he had taken. There are more than a few Olympic medalists and world champions out there who bitterly regret shackling themselves to one sport, one all-consuming pastime.

Have you ever said something to somebody only to realize, afterwards, you were really saying it to yourself?

I have absolutely no regrets about my present state in life. Yet I often feel as if maybe I should. I don't have the high paying, respected job, the showplace house, the zippy sports car. Hell, I don't even drive.

The regrets I do harbour have nothing to do with where I am and everything to do with how I got here. When kids Justin's age were zeroing in on where they wanted to go in life, I was blissfully adrift and ignorant of reality. I pissed away thousands of dollars--many of them not even mine--that would have given me a solid foundation to build a professional life on. My personal life was likewise aimless and juvenile...the two girlfriends I managed to attract, I treated abominably (and they deserved it, of course!) That one friend has stuck by me through this whole period says something admirable about him; that one woman could drag me kicking and screaming into life as it should be lived says something highly admirable about her.

If I could go back and live that period of life over again, there isn't a single thing I wouldn't do differently.

And yet...

If I was magically given an opportunity to relive my life and avoid that lost near-decade, I'd probably have to go back much earlier in time. Plunking myself down in 1990 with the mindset I had then would inevitably produce the same mindless, pointless excess that marked most of my twenties; after all, every choice I made in that blighted period seemed rational or at least justifiable at the time.

Besides, even if I could magic away the bad times, there's no guarantee I wouldn't end up in horrible times. As that eminent philosopher and sage Eminem notes, "I guess I had to go to that place to get to this one."

Here I am at 38...in some ways closer to 28 or even 18 in my social development. Some people might see this as a handicap. I think it's keeping me young.