Always Talk to Strangers

The biggest question at the heart of the post-collegiate twenty-something crisis seems to be: Now what? What do I do now that I’m done doing everything I thought I was supposed to do? If my identity no longer revolves around all the things I used to do, who am I now?

Naturally, because “It’s not who you are, but what you do, that defines you” (some families quote Shakespeare and the Bible, mine quotes Batman and The Simpsons) finding a career seems like a good way to begin answering these questions.

Find your calling! Follow your passion! Get on a track, a career path, and rest assured that by gleaning out the path and direction you’re seeking, the rest of life will work itself out.

I think this dilemma divides our twenty-something peers into three camps: The kids who’ve always known what they wanted to be when they grew up; those who’ve always had a ‘calling,’ a ‘dharma,’ a ‘destiny’ or whatever you want to call it.

Then there are the kids who realize after graduating college that the kids in the first camp have it the easiest, so then they choose a ‘calling’ for peace of mind and, for the most part, will convince themselves, and you, that they really did know all along that during those romantic poetry seminars, tax law was their real passion (true story).

And then there’s the third camp, in which I find myself: those that don’t have a clue, nor do they have the heart to fake it yet. I find comfort in constantly being reminded that, whereas the feeling of being on a path is a reassuring one, life itself very rarely follows neat linear lines from one point to the next.

One of the greatest things about traveling on a budget so low that the line between budget traveler and homeless person can at times get a bit blurry, is that it often throws me and my travel partner, Maria, into the path of random acts of human kindness.

I remember our first day of hitchhiking though Europe, I reluctantly walked up onto the road as if I were being led to my death, sheepishly stuck out my thumb and tried to fain enthusiasm while internally pleading, “Oh god, please don’t pick us up! Please don’t pick us up! Keep driving, move along, move along, nothing to see here!” I was adamant that we were going to wind up hacked to bits by a serial killer or sucked into some sort of underground sex slave trade, at the very least.

Thousands of miles and hundreds of rides later, I’ve emerged unscathed and shocked to learn that people are, for the most part, incredibly good and generous, even to strangers they’ve only just met. My latest brush with this unexpected hospitality occurred yesterday when a man named Robin noticed my friend wearing a cap bearing the logo of our alma mater while we were enjoying the free wifi at the local Safeway in Sedona, Arizona.

Within ten minutes of meeting, he was inviting us over to his home for dinner, beers and a movie night with him and his wife. Seeing as he said he graduated from our college about 35-40 years ago, I was shocked to learn that he and his wife make their living as professional bloggers.

I’d heard that companies were starting to employ people for the sole purpose of blogging and ‘Tweeting,’ but assumed that they were all young, Gen-Y’ers who were just happy to finally be getting paid for all the time they spent on Facebook and Twitter while at work.

Robin’s life story turned out to be an eclectic one made up of many different jobs, three marriages, a myriad of interests and a long-held idea for a novel/screenplay in the works. Later in the evening, two of his friends came over. They also had life stories that detoured more than once, but all of them seemed to be very happy, successful and well-adjusted real live grown-ups.

This led me to thinking, one again, that life doesn’t really follow the point A to point B path that we might sometimes wish it did. And, yet, that’s exactly what so many twenty-something’s are looking for.

The path! THE PATH! Where did it go? Birth to childhood to painfully awkward adolescence to slightly less awkward high school to college to early adulthood and then what? It’s pretty disconcerting to spend your whole life thinking you’re a strong individual, only to realize upon graduating that you don’t have a freaking clue what you want and maybe, in your entire life, you’ve never really made an important decision for yourself on your own!

Liberating and terrifying: There really is no path, just life and whatever you want to make of it.