Ash and Apricots
In the summer before I matriculated into dental school, I followed my then boyfriend out to Los Alamos, New Mexico. He had gotten a summer internship doing god only knows what at the national laboratories. I remember that the government had to interview me to make sure I wasn’t a threat at the time.
Fortunately, back then, I didn’t have any radical ideas about finances or do anything strange like mediation.
We packed up his car and made the long drive from Purdue’s midwestern campus to the top of a New Mexican mesa. The scenery change from green to brown was a gradual one. When we made the final 7,000+ foot climb into the tiny town, we once again saw trees, this time vibrant ones standing side by side with the charred remains of their companions.
During the previous summer, the entire town had been evacuated due to wildfires that ripped through the mountain forest. A few kooky holdouts stayed behind, defying government orders to leave. They poured water on their roof and stretched water hoses as far as they’d reach to douse the lawns and houses of their neighbors.
We stayed in a house that was saved this way. Just across the street, the only indication of the existence of a neighborhood was a portion of a driveway. The rest of the homes had gone up in flames.
That summer was a fertile one. The bumper crop of native apricots fed by ash rivaled only by the baby boom. As if Los Alamos wasn’t weird enough owing to secret government labs, there were now baby strollers filling sidewalks covered in apricots with a backdrop of charred suburban structures.
As strange as it was, if there was one moment in time that I could go back to, it would be this one. Before going to professional school.
Apart from the delightful time I had making gallons of apricot jam from bushels of the neighbors unwanted bounty, I wish I could have known more about how money worked. I wish I had known about the principles of saving and investing. Because I just might have decided not to continue my education. Like that crazy outlaw of a neighbor, I might have taken a different path than the one that was expected.
As I thought back to my incredible and odd summer, I realized that, had I found an average job at that time with my 4-year degree, I would still have been able to early retire. And, given my innate proclivity to frugality (ie: asking to pick apricots from groaning neighborhood trees) I have no doubt I would have done it sooner than I did in my actual life
It’s not just the time and money I spent earning my degree, it was the things that I traded off while earning them. I no longer had time to forage and make jam. I didn’t keep up with many of the friends I had made in college. There wasn’t any leftover bandwidth to write or do the things that interested me.
At each step of the way, I could have turned back. I thought about it several times. But after adding one year’s worth of student loans to the ledger, it was hard to imagine how I might ever pay them off with a regular job. So, I kept on going.
I thought maybe, things would be better when I started practicing. After I started practicing, I thought things would improve after I got more experience. After I got more experience, I thought things would get better after I paid off my student loans.
As I subsequently discovered, the bar for “better when” is always moving. It sparks up quickly, then licks across contentment, burning it to the ground.
I know I can’t go back to that strange and beautiful summer. I can’t go back to the ash or the apricots. But, I can realize that the living is happening right now, in this moment. That there is no finding better later…only right now. And ultimately, I can live each day with the gratitude of finding my path…even though I took the long way around.
