Choices

Something that keeps hitting me on my travels is the difficulty I have ordering coffee.  

Yes.  That’s my deep thought of the day.  But it’s more than that, we live in a world with so many choices and even more interpretations of any given option based on influencing personalities and cultures.

How do all these choices effect us?  Do we make them or do we avoid making them or do we just chose the easy options?  This pertains to my journey and struggle because I consider our parents and grandparents generations and how they learned to stick with something in a way I think my generation struggles with.  This has become clear to me in two very prevalent and prominent parts of life: work and love.

I was working with a friend who graduated a few years after me on her resume last week and she asked about the longstanding rule that a resume should never have exceeded one page.  That was fine when only a small portion of the population attended college and a smaller portion attended post graduate education and you took a job or selected a field and perfected it, learned it, grew within it and stuck with it till retirement.  Now people switch industries like hair styles, not quite on a whim but also as one grows out they don’t necessarily feel the same need to perfect and grow into a role, instead they believe they have outgrown it and look elsewhere for who or what can do more for them.  Where we used to stick something out five years, wait more than an earning season for a promotion, and sometimes only work for one company our entire lives the standard now is if someone seems to stick with a company more than a year or two.  Is this the fate of our generation to always pursue greener grass rather than grow a position into something that is really amazing for themselves? Or is it a larger symptom of always thinking something else will make us happier and instead of a pause explore and then go with the right direction are we a constant pause and reset generation?

I consider the same with relationships.  My parents met forty years ago, they dated three months got engaged and said “I do” a mere three months after that.  They were in love but they were pragmatic, they talked about their good and bad traits and they were also madly in love.  They made a decision to make it work, and they did through all the good and bad.  Through a very humble poor start to good fortune that came with hard work and through my mother’s defeat of breast cancer and my father’s eventually terminal struggle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.  They truly embodied, for better or worse.  Our generation can’t seem to get this down.  We are used to the best, to options, to everything down to our jeans and suits custom made just for us, and even those we grow tired of entirely to hastily.  We wait till we’re older, set in our ways, stubborn and independent to then try to merge our lives with someone in exactly the same place.  The generations before didn’t wait for “what can this person offer me” they decided to make a commitment, grow and commit to love, not to their own and then their partners careers, and they grew together.  They had a faith in each other that as a team they could make it through anything.

When I started this project I was very much of the mindset: pause. reset.  Because that is what I had just done.  But the truth is that can often be the problem with our generation which is how I got to: pause. explore.  There are times in our life we should hit reset, not everything is for everyone, but its a button to use much more selectively than our generation does.  There is so much in this world worth exploring, worth holding onto, but we only know that once we do.  Once we grow an our of college entry level job into running a department and being in expert in what we do.  When we chose a partner have it be for the person, the team you are together and know that every team has winning and losing days, weeks even, but its the practice in between that makes you great and makes something sustainable – the commitment that is lacking in our generation.

4 countires. 2 weeks.  One coffee order infinite different ways.  Iced double espresso.  At home to me this means a cup of ice with a double espresso poured over it – I can doctor it myself with a drop of milk or some course brown sugar.  In the rest of the world it can vary from an espresso with one ice cube to an (specifically asked not to be) iced americano, to an espresso poured over ice then the ice melted quickly into an iced americano with steamed milk and so many other ways in between.

Why is this? Do we have too many options?  Is this how our culture is meant to be a smaller world but so many different ways to ask for or do something that nothing ever feels quite right?  Or do we just forget sometimes that the world gives us exactly what it should and we should find a way to work with that?  

 

What’s the greatest work or love story that gives you goosebumps and makes you want to emulate it?