Joshua Rothman just published a haunting piece in The New Yorker: “What if you could do it all over?” In that article, he explores the concept of looking back at one’s past and considering the lives that one could have led, but did, and will, not.
Rothman notes that as we grow older, the menu of possible life choices grows narrower, our range of possibilities shrinks, and we become increasingly locked-in to whatever life we are currently living. There are still decisions to be made and options to pursue, but that time in our lives when anything seemed possible — which some of us were lucky enough to have had when we were younger — is gone forever. The problem is particularly acute for secular people, Rothman notes, because we don’t believe in an afterlife or reincarnation. This life is the only one we can conceive of, and in one’s mid-50s, there is less and less room for radical innovation.
Yesterday, my 17-year old daughter asked if I thought we should have stayed in Mexico, where we spent a year’s sabbatical in 2011–12, and where I had received a permanent job offer from an excellent local university. I thought about that carefully. Had we stayed, my ex-wife and I might not have divorced three years ago, saving my kids and I enormous heartache. But then again, I would never have met my current partner and would not have experienced an adult romantic relationship free of sadness that had infiltrated my 20-year marriage.
I will never become an opera singer, restaurant owner, investment banker, or international humanitarian aid worker. I don’t have the knowledge, training, instincts, or the contacts, and neither my body nor my brain is up to the task of learning it all from scratch.
There are a few new directions I can still go in, however, and I imagine that language is one of the master keys that can unlock those few remaining doors. I’m spending a lot of time now on language websites like Lingoda.com and iboux.com, improving my Spanish and French. I’m not sure what, precisely, I can do with those tools, but my imagination tells me something wonderful is waiting around the linguistic corner. Learning a new language is like entering into an entirely new world; new foods, books, movies, ideas, politics, and ways of being. In the age of COVID, it’s like traveling, all without moving rom my little patch of Minnesota.
