Image source: Merlina McGovern
I suppose to make this daily double creative responsibility a little bit easier, I’ll try to combine my current Inktober prompt and my weekly blog posts. Today’s prompt was “Path.” My ink interpretation of this prompt was a bit of a cutesy Halloween take, with a little ghost taking a small break while floating along a forest path.
This was a bit of an easy prompt to complete. We all know what a path is, and the metaphor of traveling down the path of life is one that is facile and yet a foundational one. Our life begins and it ends, simple as that.
Of course, the path from beginning to end is never simple, and it is totally and utterly unique to each person who takes it, even if you are an identical twin. If I stop to think a little bit about my own life path, I can certainly say that it has been a slightly wandering and somewhat rootless one. My parents were travelers. My father joined the US Marine Corps when he was 18 and never looked back. He married a Filipina woman when he was stationed in the Philippines, and she left her entire family and support system to travel across the world to be with him.
As my father rose through the ranks in the military, he was moved from the US mainland to Hawaii and then to Okinawa, Japan. He always wanted to take his family with him, opting for the longer tours of duty where we would travel together with him rather than the shorter tours that would require him to spend long periods of time without us.
As we traveled to and lived on various military bases with my family, I often thought about the path this childhood was forging for me. We learned how to adapt and make friends wherever we went. The school systems were wonderful, and learning and getting an education was always strongly encouraged. Living on a military base, the vices we were exposed to were few and far between. The kids in our Okinawa schools had almost zero exposure to hard drugs, with the worst stories I heard being about huffing paint fumes.
This path protected me but also primed my mind to be open to new things and new experiences. So, I was ready to be adventurous, but only if it was somewhat safe. It’s why I went to a university that was a one and a half hour flight away from my parents; it was far enough away to feel like I had some amount of independence, but it was still close enough that I could drive home with a semester’s worth of laundry if I needed to.
That same middle-of-the-road mentality is one that I took with me to the workforce. It’s what made me choose to work in the publishing field when I first left college (because English was always my strongest subject), and it’s what kept me at workplaces for decades, even after the sheen of working with published words had dulled to a weak corporate glow. It’s also what allowed me to fall in love with a man I had just met while meeting with friends of friends and traveling across the country to be with him.
And now I believe I’m about, barring any unforeseen disaster, midway along my path of life. This is the part of my life where the way forward is less clear. It’s also the part of my life where I look back at the path I’ve taken and wonder a bit how life would be different if I had taken a different fork in the road. What if I hadn’t gone to college? What if I had not fallen for someone from the East Coast? What if I had gone back to get a graduate degree? What if? What if?
I’ve often heard the advice to have a five-year goal to keep yourself on track on this path of life. I’ve found that advice to be very hard to follow. I’ve probably set a five-year goal to write a novel every five years. Things get so hectic, it can really be hard to predict what I’m going to do for the weekend, let alone for the next five years. For now, I’ve resigned myself to enjoy each single day on this journey, on this path that I’ve taken. So far, it has led me to just enough adventure to satisfy my semi-wandering soul.
Comments