20 Oct 2016

There’s a particular fear I remember having around age four: being left behind in the local shopping centre. Not abandoned,  just forgotten. Left to sit somewhere between Coles and the up-market fashion stores forever. Just sitting there, waiting. Kind of… lost.

Thankfully, I was never left in a shopping centre and forgotten, although I did once get lost in a Big W and they had to announce my name on the speakers–embarrassing enough. I do have a vague memory of being lost in the aquarium on a school excursion before the teacher guided–or possibly herded–me back to the main corral of kids.

But there’s a point in life where you move past that. You leave high school, and move on to an apprenticeship, uni, travel and realise, at that point there’s no one there to herd you. You’re on your own.

My first response when I discovered this was exploiting it to the fullest. I would stay out late with friends, go to parties I really shouldn’t have gone to, or sit around campus drinking WAY too much coffee, knowing there was no one who could stop me having my fifteenth double-shot.

That’s not to say we’re completely isolated: friendship groups and peers provide some sort of pathway through this period. If you’re lucky, you’ve got the kind of friends who’ve got their heads screwed on a bit more than you’ve got yours: if you’re like me, you’re all in the muck together.

Either is fine. It’s actually a good thing.

Making decisions is a learned behaviour. We’re not born able to weigh up the options in life–whether it’s making the correct turn in a Big W or aquarium, or choosing a university course or apprenticeship. Figuring out the big questions takes a skill we develop over time: reasoning. It involves balancing the positives and negatives of a situation, and making a decision based on what’s going to have the best cost-benefit ratio. That is, what’s going to get the best result with the least negative backwash.

Like any skill, making decisions takes practice. I ended up at a film school for six months because I hadn’t figured out where I wanted to go. Nothing wrong with that at all: I had a great time, and I learned a lot about what I didn’t want to do. But, making that decision taught me that I could make decisions based on more than the short-term gain. I wound up a uni student, and so here we are.

The future isn’t some big, incomprehensible mess–even when it seems like it. Getting lost is part of the structure of the whole thing. Getting lost is how you learn to make decisions–to find a way through. And getting it wrong is okay sometimes because the truth is, nobody has a map.

It’s much better to learn to make decisions while you’re young, than to stay stuck with decisions you don’t like at age, say, thirty. Choose what you want for the long-term. And don’t make those long term decisions for short term gain. Life is long-haul, like a bus trip to Melbourne from Sydney–you don’t want to eat all your snacks before Albury and be stuck the rest of the way with nothing to chew on. You want your snacks to last; so you plan ahead. Think them through, talk them over with people you trust–or don’t trust. Just ignore what this latter group says, maybe.

In the end, whatever you choose, things will work out OK. You’ll find your own way. Maybe with some help from friends, parents, professionals–but if you know when your compass is going funny, and you know to ask some good questions, you’ll be sweet.

Don’t paralyse yourself: make decisions, make mistakes, get lost, and learn.

by Hamish Wood