Life: an individual journey on a public path

Recently, while scrolling instagram, I came across a post from BSO flutist and professional coach Elizabeth Rowe. She was talking about her final season with the symphony, which recently started, and how different transitions at different times in our life can affect our perception of them. She mentioned that some transitions are done together and at the same stage of life i.e., graduating high school, getting a license, etc. Some transitions, however, might be done at odd times and maybe even "out of order" from the expected norm.

This really struck a chord with me. Growing into my professional career during the pandemic left me with a lot of questions, and not many answers. Am I doing enough, is this where I'm supposed to be, I see other people acheiving and I'm not, is something wrong with me? These questions swirled around for the majority of the pandemic, and truthfully, they still do. To a certain extent, these questions are good. They're a reminder that you care deeply about your career, and that you are invested in your own success. There are the obvious drawbacks, however, to these thoughts. They can be paralyzing.

This is where Elizabeth Rowe's comments come in. She refreshed my perspective on what it means to be on a professional journey. In a lot of ways, our journeys are deeply personal, individual, and run at the just the right speed for the present moment. This path though, does not happen in isolation. With social media, and information being at the fingertips of thousands of fellow professionals in your field, it can seem like all of our achievements are instantly presented to the world for judgement, along with everyone else's. An individual journey on a public path.

I believe that it is so important to focus on your own progress and to sculpt a life and career that maximizes happiness and fulfillment. I also know that we simply cannot escape the plague of comparison. The consolation in this, however, is that every other person is feeling the exact same way. We try to display our greatest accomplishments and hide the failures and missteps that led us to that success. Although no one wants to share their failures, maybe we could all benefit with a more tempered and human approach to our journeys, and to the journeys of others. Everything happens in its own time, and there is no one template for success. We each create our own template of success using tools and materials we find along the way, and that's what the journey is all about.