I think the best years of your life are any years where you are singing that song of yourself to a choir of friends all singing their own in harmony with yours.

Are The Best Years of Your Life are Over?

We were just about to touch down in Guatemala and it was time to stow away my computer and put my seat back in the upright position as the cabin prepared for landing. Not wanting to dive back into the Tom Robbins book I was reading, I opened the United Airlines’ inflight magazine, Hemispheres, a top-paying travel writing market that seeks uncompelling travel writing where five-star dining trumps cross-cultural entanglements.

I opened to page 30, where Ed Frankl wrote a an article that pitted sought-after college graduation commencement speakers, like John Kerry and Al Gore, against each other to determine who was the more desirable speaker.

He led with this sentence: “Your college years really are the best of your life—which becomes apparent when you’re on the threshold of the real world, with its ‘Laundromats’ and ‘jobs.’”

I closed the magazine. My mind traveled to conversations over the last two weeks in Minneapolis, Boston, and New York. I thought about this “real world,” its laundromats, its jobs. I thought about college, the endless parties, that awkward navigation of newfound sexuality confused and still governed by unnatural dogmas which are part of the baptismal package, thought about the pseudo confidence of young, untested ideals. Then I thought about life now, lived freely out of a suitcase, and I remembered the slow, but meaningful struggle to find my balance as a writer, musician and freelance philanthropist.

I thought of something I’d just read on Instagram:

I thought about the top five regrets of the dying, which a hometown friend Nick Schwieters had just posted on Facebook.

I relived a conversation I’d had with Julianne Mason, an amiga and mother of two who’s my age, who’s a musician melodically struggling to sing the songs of her heart while she raises her beautiful daughters in New York City. Yesterday morning, we talked about how we both still deal with doubt regarding our creative endeavoring, but how proud our college selves would be if they could drop in our current lives and take a look around.

Neither our college pasts, nor our present selves would believe Ed Frankl’s pronouncement that “your college years really are the best of your life.”

I thought about Sara Montour, an intrepid photographer based in Minneapolis whose every ounce of being is spent building up the artists she surrounds herself with. Currently, she is on a road trip in the Pacific Northwest, which I am gleefully following on Instagram.

I thought about my friend Josh Brownlee, a videographer and travel blogger who had just popped in on me last month in Antigua, Guatemala, as he began an open ended trip through Latin America, thought about the image he had just posted on Facebook:

I thought about the sect of seeking souls that I consider myself part of, which consists of friends I have, and those I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting—writers, travelers, poets, musicians, seekers, reachers, graspers, hula-hoopers, painters, clowns, lovers, revelers, performance artists, filmmakers, firebreathers, troubadours, designers, hostellers, comic book shop owners, volunteers, builders of eco lodges, and humanitarians who seem to look the world straight in the eye, wink, blow it a kiss, and then make a silly face which says everything we need to know about them—they are on our team and the best day of their life is today, because they are doing things that seed glitter in their soul.

So when Ed Frankl writes that “the best years of your life” are a certain stage, governed by age, in a temporal cage, all he is saying is that his own life choices have led him to a rut and he personally was happier in college. Hopefully, Ed will never speak to college graduates. Best save those impressionable ears for someone who believes that their best years come and stay when they learn to be the best version of themselves.

College was a wonderful time and party, but ultimately one I am glad got raided by a higher reality.

Travel involves displacement, and for me displacement has always skipped hand and hand with self-reflection. This last trip to the states—Minneapolis, Boston, New York—I watched my brother adopted from Kenya marry, got together with friends I can’t get enough of, and was left with the alleviating certainty when I look back on the past, I do so from a present I’m proud to be a part of (and if it requires me to end a sentence with a preposition to say so, so be it).

I’m left today certain that our lives are too short to get caught in a job where we spend most of our time learning someone else’s song, time that could spent learning how to sing our own. I think the best years of your life are any years where you are singing that song of yourself to a choir of friends all singing their own in harmony with yours. And if we have to visit laundromats every few weeks to live that life, well Ed, that’s a price I’m happy to pay.