During this last year of college, I wrote a paper entitled “The Anxieties of Freedom and the Perils of Choice.” This paper centered around a Henry James story about a man who returns to his childhood home after an absence of many years. As we walks around the empty halls of the house, he finds that it is haunted by the ghost of who he might have been had he chosen to stay at home instead of traveling abroad.

This story has come to mind several times recently as I’ve experienced the vicissitudes of graduated life. I was just commenting to a friend about how, before I graduated, I used to think I had it all buttoned up. I already had a full time job, decent salary with benefits, a (relatively) clear life plan, and an intense desire to be done with school so I could get on with it. But something strange happened when I walked across that podium and received that piece of paper. It was as if somebody had taken my neatly-planned and projected life and shook it up. All of a sudden I was presented with a dizzying array of choices. I mean, if I decided to pack up and move to New York City and become a waiter, what was to stop me? And then there was the even more terrifying status-quo.

Here’s where the anxiety and peril comes in. When you’re faced with so many viable options, how do you choose? And moreover, what don’t you choose? Because for every choice that you make, there are a thousand other selves that will never be because of the decisions that take you away from who you might have been had you chosen differently. And how do you choke down the paralyzing fear that, at some point, that alternative self might come back to haunt you?

Ultimately, I guess we have to choose and accept the consequences, whatever they might be. I just hope I do a good job of choosing.

(Thanks to this article from The New York Times for the awesome title and some of the ideas contained herein.)

Tags: choice, introspection, graduation