My favorite place to unwind was the ocean. I would float for two to three hours at a time, oblivious to everything around me except the warm, nurturing water. For the first time in my life, I completely let go, relaxing every muscle, emptying my head and heart, listening only to the lapping waves. I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the ocean began. I was one with everything, and everything was one with me.
By far the most stunning beach was our last stop, Phra Nang Bay. Long before the tourist industry, filmmakers, and rock climbers discovered it, we knew we’d found the jewel of Thailand. Sheer limestone pillars rose from the turquoise water while pearly, soft sand faded underfoot into the sea. When we weren’t swimming or sunbathing, we explored the large cave on shore, climbing up steep walls on slippery ropes through its myriad passages. By now our group had expanded to a gang of seven, joined by Catherine and Marion’s friend Paula, Cath’s new Thai boyfriend Prin, a Danish guy named Henrik, and another Brit named Peter. At night, we ate fresh fish at one of the only three restaurants on the island, skinny-dipped after dark, and danced until the wee hours at a bar carved into the cave. Life was good.
Watching Prin and Catherine kiss, part of me hoped I too would fall in love during my travels. But I was also glad that I hadn’t met anyone special, as I might have missed out on other relationships and travel experiences. Although I wouldn’t have complained if Mr. Right came paddling in on the next wooden boat, I was content with my flirty encounters along the trail.
I wish I could’ve stayed in Thailand forever, but my travel clock was ticking. I had only a couple of months left to get through Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Bali, and Australia before showing up back in New Zealand to lead the summer exchange trip again. As I hugged Catherine and Marion good-bye, I already missed them. A special bond forms between backpacking buddies that’s different from the friendships you make back home. Especially if you travel together for a long time, you go through things and see things that no one else can understand, no matter how many photos you show or how well you try to explain. Twenty years later, Cath and I still write, email, and talk on the phone. We’re currently planning our next big trip.
At twenty-two, life was a wonderful adventure. I was drunk on the freedom of being able to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. For fifteen months, I’d visited fascinating, off-the-beaten-track places, seeing things I never even knew existed. I’d experienced countries from the inside, as a member of the family. I’d interacted with dozens of diverse people and cultures, helping me understand new and different parts of myself.
I had embraced the world, and the world embraced me back.
When I was twelve years old, I got Bat Mitzvahed with my sister. “Mazel Tov! Welcome to adulthood!” everyone said, shaking my hand and kissing my cheeks. But after opening my presents and sending out thank-you notes, I was no more ready to be a grown-up than before I had memorized all of those Torah passages.
Now of legal age, I still didn’t know how to be an adult. I had been back in the United States from my world trip for only three weeks. Unfortunately, my re-entry hadn’t been as joyful as my travels. I arrived home just in time for a recession, penniless and without a job.
Many tribal cultures provide meaningful, practical rites of passage to assist adolescents in their transition to adulthood—things like sending them off into the woods with no food to learn how to hunt. In contrast, the focus of most Western coming-of-age ceremonies is a big party. We generally don’t offer pragmatic instruction to prepare young people to become happy, well-functioning adults. My life question, “What do I want to do and be in the world?” now had practical constraints: “Can I do what I love and still afford to eat?”
One evening during my senior year in college, my roommates and I sat around our living room talking about what each of us would likely become in the future. “Becky, Heidi, Elise, and Ignacio are going to be lawyers . . . David and Paulie are doctors . . . Jason’s an artist . . . Megan and Kevin are going to do something in business . . . and Laurie? Hmm. We have no idea.”
Neither did I.
After four intensive years at an Ivy League school, I needed a break from academics, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever go back to school. I certainly didn’t want to go directly to graduate school, as had many of my friends. I wasn’t going to become a doctor, go to law school, get an entry-level job in a Fortune 500 company, or do anything else that people were saying a Harvard graduate “should” do. I wasn’t purposely rebelling; it’s just that the current options felt so limiting, and none of them felt like “me.” My interests and talents were much more diverse, something I first realized while hanging off a cliff in Switzerland.
Why Say “Or” When You Can Say “And”?
Appreciate and Allow Multiple Passions
My parents had promised I could travel every summer during college, and I held them to their word. Not only was I eager to visit my Swiss family and farm, but I also wanted to climb a serious alpine peak and learn German. Thinking it would be a great way to kill two birds with one stone, I had signed up for a Bergsteigerschule (mountaineering school) in the heart of the Swiss German Alps.
That was not one of my better brainstorms.
“Diese?” (“This one?”) I called down to my guides, fifty feet below me.
“Nein, nein!” (“No, no!”) they shouted back up.
I was trying to figure out which rope on my waist I should clip into the carabiner to secure me to the side of the cliff, versus the one that if released, would send me plummeting down the mountain.
My guides, Hans and Fritz (yes, those were actually their names) were about as good in English as I was in German, and they kept mixing up key words like “up” and “down”—very inconvenient when you’re hanging off the sheer face of a rock.
As I dangled in my harness, I reflected on my visit that past week with my Swiss family. While I quickly fell back under the spell of my charming, homey village, I missed my Harvard roommates and friends, with their quick, witty senses of humor and passion for knowledge and the arts. I realized I was both a country mouse and a city mouse, a person who loved the relaxed, simple lifestyle on a farm and the exciting vibrancy of an intellectually and culturally rich town like Boston.
I’ve never understood cultures that push people to compartmentalize and specialize, criticizing anyone with multiple interests and skills as a “Jack of all trades, master of none.” During the Renaissance, people admired masters like da Vinci and Michelangelo for their versatile passions and talents, recognizing that the ability to do many things competently is an advanced proficiency in and of itself.
In that moment, it dawned on me that it wasn’t a choice of Switzerland or America, cows versus college; I could fit in many places and pursue multiple passions.
Now that I was entering
