It is officially the middle of December. The date has entered double digits, the countdown to the big ball drop on the last day of the month is approaching, and pretty soon all those ‘The Year In Review’ issues of popular magazines will be hitting the stands. It therefore seems an appropriate time to take a step back and look at what life has taught me in the last year. And as I sit here and look back, I notice there is one over-arching lesson that has repeatedly reared its ugly head:

Life… gets complicated.

Come on, you know it’s true. Things that used to look black and white turn shades of grey and ivory the older you get. The consequences of your actions are more readily identifiable. Caution and deliberation replace impulse and rashness.

Which begs the question: where have all the Disney endings gone? Isn’t Alice supposed to wake up? Shouldn’t the shoe fit Cinderella’s foot? Of course Peter Pan is going to beat Captain Hook! Everything is supposed to work out in the end… or is it?

I’ve said it loads of times: you grow up thinking you’re going to go to college, get your dream job, meet the significant other of your dreams, get married, have kids, and live happily ever after. I can’t help but notice as I look around my friends and family that I do not know a single person for whom life has followed this grandmaster scheme. Quite the contrary. Everyone has experienced bumps in the road, detours, missed exits, and/or traffic congestion since entering adulthood. Life gets complicated.

When exactly does this happen, I wonder? At what moment does life take the wide-eyed idealist and pound them into, at best a realist, at worst, a pessimist? When is it that we begin to adjust our expectations to match our reality? I mean, it’s always something… if you don’t have relationship problems, you have money problems. If your relationship and your finances are going along just swimmingly, then you have family drama, or you hate your job. The perfect life does not seem to exist. Life seems to be about being happy with imperfection and letting go of the need to control the environment around you in order to obtain some out-of-reach vision of perfection you cling to from deep in your childhood.

There are people out there who would justifiably take issue with what I just said – that we should learn to be happy with imperfection. They would argue no one should settle for anything less than everything they always wanted. And I think there is something to that. It would be truly tragic if we were to simply talk ourselves into being content with our given lot in life and never try to change anything.

Which is why I think the biggest thing I have come to understand in the last year is this: life is not perfect; it’s terribly complicated the more you learn and experience, but I think life might be about deciding which things are most important to you (love, family, career, friends, robots… whatever…) and making sure you don’t settle for anything less than happiness when it comes to the things that mean the most to you. Example: maybe you don’t have the biggest house or the fanciest pants, but you have the world’s greatest spouse, damnit!

I suspect this is why we are supposed to respect our elders – they already know all of this stuff, and if we’d just listen to them once in a while, perhaps the shock of life wouldn’t be so jarring – and we wouldn’t be left looking bewildered and wondering when it all got so complicated.

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