You Only Live Once

“Did you ever regret a decision you had made?” the Korean graduate student asked me across a casual restaurant booth. I was her informal local advisor. With an international scholarship to an American university of her choice, she had enrolled in a program near her fiancé instead of another better suited to her needs. Now she feared she had made a mistake.

I paused to think. “Little decisions, yes,” I said. “Like not taking an umbrella when rain was in the forecast. Big decisions, not really. They affect so much, I can’t begin to know what my life would be like today if I’d made a different choice.”

The rapper Drake popularized the acronym YOLO (“You only live once”) in his 2011 “The Motto.” Like the ancient Latin carpe diem (“seize the day”), YOLO suggests embracing opportunities. It implies willingness to risk embarrassment, failure, peer pressure, or the comfort of habit for the sake of personal authenticity.

We may never learn whether a particular choice was the “right” choice. In Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” a traveler comes to a fork in the forest track. Choosing either path will mean abandoning the other. For years I thought Frost’s message was to choose “the one less traveled by,” the one that “was grassy and wanted wear.” Then I realized the next line said something quite different: “Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.” To avoid standing still forever, sometimes you must choose on no basis whatever. You may never learn where the other path would have led.

Image: Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash.