Go all the way.

Unfinished Business

“If you must begin, then go all the way, because if you begin and quit, the unfinished business you have left behind will haunt you for all time.”

                                      Ghogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

As a young girl of seventeen, I began college in western North Carolina. I set out to be a career woman—never saw myself as being in college to earn my MRS. Times were brewing trouble though, and soon we were at war in Vietnam. I dated a young man two years older than I, who possessed a low draft number. Knowing he would be drafted into the Army as soon as he graduated, he joined the Air Force instead. He asked me to marry him at Christmas; we wed in August, he took off to OCS in Texas in September, and flight school in December. I, now all of nineteen, enrolled in classes at a community college while I waited for his training to end. We moved to Sacramento and I enrolled at the University there, hoping to finish my degree. One semester before I finished, he was assigned to Eglin AFB in Florida, so off we went. I taught school, even though I did not yet have the degree—and took classes at a college sixty miles away, one course at a time. When he shipped out to Thailand, instead of going back to school full time, I went to work. Long story short, I did not finish an undergraduate degree until age thirty-two. I divorced, remarried and had a child before I had a degree. Over the course of fourteen years, I had accrued enough hours for two degrees yet I had only one. In hindsight, I wonder what on earth I was thinking. I wonder whether my life would be different had I stayed in school and delayed marriage until after graduation. Do you look back on some portion of your life and question your judgment?

Women think for themselves nowadays. They don't have the same strictures that we did—the ones that put the man and his career first. And that's a good thing. I learned many necessary lessons in those fourteen years, so I don't regret them, but I will always wonder what may have happened had I chosen differently. I didn't have the starch or the guidance to decide something for myself—I just followed protocol. Word to the wise—don't do that. When you start something, finish it. Don't be distracted by convention or tribal values. Set your course and stay with it. That way, fifty years from now, you'll have something besides unfinished business to wonder about!

                                        In the spirit,

                                           Jane