The Options List

You can't always get what you want...

The perfect title for an autobiography was already taken by 1938, when British author  W. Somerset Maugham published The Summing Up. Comprised of a pretty small amount of personal information for its genre, the book instead offers a lifetime of reflections on various subjects, the best part being, I think, an examination of career choices.

Maugham was a trained physician and had worked in the secret service during World War I.  However, his ultimate vocational  pick was full time writing, despite almost starving during the first ten years.  He persisted because "an artist can be free.  In other callings (medicine, the law, etc.) you are no longer free."  Looking back on your legacy, sir, beyond the several books which became classics, you could have done a lot worse than to be a major influence on George Orwell.

Often, choosing the harder thing to do is the right thing.  Sometimes your available options look no better than Mr. Hobson's.  And often you may look back ruefully on a major missed opportunity or a wrong road taken.  Or possibly you might wonder how you had gotten so undeservedly lucky.

I can't say it any better than Amor Towles did in his 2011 book Rules of  Civility (Viking Press):

Life doesn't have to provide you any options at all.  It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics.  To have even one year when you're presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, you character, your course -- that's by the grace of God alone.

Life is less like a journey than it is a game... In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions -- we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second.  And before you know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.