Balance

I think a big contributor to happiness in life is balancing your long and short term needs. Neither should take precedent, but it’s also about realizing what needs to be done in the short term to fulfill long term goals.

A lot of people, especially students, have a very weird view of what life’s like. There’s a constant focus, or at least emphasis put on events which occur within a calendar year, say, or within a work week. It’s always about meeting a deadline, then another and another.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think life works that way as much as we’d like to think. Sure a job may require deadlines, but real life – the life you actually like living – doesn’t really consist of the same sort of thing.

Kids do come with a due date but that’s about the only thing you can predict about them. They are not fixed and permanent like a term paper say. These things require a strategy far different from the one we learn in university.

Maybe I’m saying things people already know. But, I’ve met a lot of people in my time at university who’ve lived lives not possible in the real world. Lives only possible in university.

And, I might be the only person to say this, but there’s a charm to life after university that I didn’t realize till my fourth year.

Not only will I have some need to be financially stable, i.e. think about money in terms of decades and not months, I will also be free. I don’t like having many of the important decisions being predicated on the fact that I will only be in Kingston till the end of April.

It makes me feel ill-at-ease and impermanent. I hate that my relationships, work and even my house will all be gone. It makes me long for a mortgage, in a way. At least what that represents, something which will be mine forever. For as long as I want.

I guess we’ve veered slightly from our thesis, but my point isn’t lost. Life is easily looked at wrong. One might argue, say, that this impermanence in Kingston will lead to me seeing things for what they are. It will shatter the patina of knowing that if I have misgivings over certain behaviours – they won’t last long!

So, there’s downsides and warts and all that. But, what I do now can decide, and I guess realize, a future I want more easily than just bemoaning the situation I’m faced with.

-Clay