The Things We Rule Out

On Clarity, Part One

I got married for the first time in my mid-forties.

People love to ask questions about that.

“Is this your second marriage?”

No.

“Is it his second marriage?”

Also no.

“Do you both have kids?”

No again.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those stories. They just aren’t ours.

I understand why people ask. We make sense of one another by placing the details into an order we recognize.

Marriage usually happens earlier. By your forties, there may already have been a marriage, a divorce, children, or some combination of the three.

That’s a familiar story.

It just isn’t the only one.

The truth is, I never really thought I would get married.

I don’t mean that I had made some firm decision against it. I wasn’t announcing that marriage wasn’t for me or giving speeches about how I planned to live my life alone.

It was quieter than that.

Marriage didn’t feel like something that I needed.

I’m not sure I ever stopped to ask why.

It was less of a conclusion and more of an assumption that settled in over time. I treated it like a fact because I couldn’t picture anything different.

Then I met Mike.

And eventually, in my mid-forties, I stood beside him and got married for the first time.

There are things we don’t pursue because we genuinely don’t want them.

There are also things we don’t pursue because we’ve quietly decided they aren’t available to us.

Those are not the same thing.

I’ve learned to be careful not to confuse the two.

It’s strange how easily an assumption can disguise itself as clarity.

We tell ourselves we know.

I’m not someone who will get married.

I could never change careers.

I’m not the kind of person who moves away.

It’s too late to begin again.

That kind of life is for someone else.

Sometimes those statements are true. There are things we simply don’t want, and knowing that can be freeing.

But sometimes we say we don’t want something because wanting it would require us to admit that we’re afraid it may never happen.

Or because we can’t imagine how we would get from where we are to where we’d like to be.

Or because the life we can see from where we’re standing feels like the only life available to us.

I wonder how many possibilities we remove before life ever gets the chance to answer us.

I didn’t picture myself getting married.

I also didn’t picture myself moving across the country, becoming a financial advisor, or building the life I have in Colorado.

None of those things appeared fully formed in my mind years in advance.

Most of the time, I was simply paying attention to what no longer felt right and taking the next step I could see.

That is different from having a plan.

It is also different from certainty.

I used to think clarity meant knowing.

Knowing where you were going.

Knowing what you wanted.

Knowing how everything would turn out.

Now I’m less convinced.

There have been times when I felt completely certain about something and was wrong. There have also been decisions that changed my life even though I made them without knowing where they would lead.

Getting married didn’t prove that my earlier assumption was foolish.

Younger versions of me were working with the experiences and evidence they had at the time.

They simply couldn’t see this far ahead.

None of us can.

That thought has made me a little less interested in predicting my life and a little more interested in noticing it.

What have I dismissed without really examining it?

What do I believe is impossible simply because it hasn’t happened yet?

And what truly isn’t mine, not because I couldn’t have it, but because I don’t want the life that would come with it?

Those questions don’t always give me immediate answers.

They do help me separate what I know from what I’ve assumed.

I don’t believe we need to pursue every possibility. That sounds exhausting.

Some doors should remain closed.

Some paths are wrong for us.

Some dreams belong to other people, no matter how impressive they look from the outside.

But I want to close those doors honestly.

Not because I was afraid to knock.

Not because I assumed no one would answer.

Not because my life failed to follow the usual timeline and I mistook “not yet” for “never.”

I got married for the first time in my mid-forties.

That fact still surprises people.

Sometimes it surprises me too.

Not because getting married later is especially remarkable, but because I once believed so completely that it wouldn’t happen.

I didn’t know I was wrong.

I thought I was being realistic.

And that may be one of the reasons I keep thinking about clarity.

How often are we seeing our lives clearly?

And how often are we simply looking through the limits of what we can currently imagine?