It’s very easy to fall into the trap of wondering what your life would be like if *insert event* happened. Thinking about whether the grass is greener somewhere else is understandable, but in my mind the best way to move past that is to start focusing on watering and fertilizing your own lawn.

A couple of weeks ago, Clara and I went back to Oregon to stay with my family for a week. It was a lot of fun, despite my allergies deciding that it was time for me to suffer, but it’s always a good experience being back in Roseburg and experiencing, for a minute, what my life growing up was like, and for Clara to meet my family & (more importantly) my animals. Last Friday, Clara flew from Eugene back to Louisville while I flew up to Seattle to see some of my friends from undergrad. Despite the fact that I got there six hours late due to an initial mechanical issue with my plane that required me to switch flights that meant I had to have a connecting flight in Portland (which meant my first flight literally took 20 minutes), I finally got to my friend John’s apartment and met up with my friends at the bars in one of Seattle’s neighborhoods after spending $105 on two Ubers.

What followed was one of the best weekends in a while. It’s always fun to catch up with old friends, but I’ve really missed my friends from Oregon State lately. It took all of two seconds for things to go back to what they were two years ago, to drink and to laugh, to show each other reels and to not feel like any time has passed since we all lived in a dilapidated white house full of mold and uncleaned (thanks to some of my roommates) dishes.

After Caleb and Keagan left on Saturday, John and I walked around the campus of the University of Washington, which is right on one of the lakes in Seattle. While it has a bit of a different vibe than what I’m used to, I hate to say that campus is super nice. It’s way better than Louisville’s, and has a stronger “college campus” vibe than Oregon State’s. While I still despise Washington for deserting the Pac-12 in favor of the Big 10, I have to admit that their university does a lot of things right, and is CERTAINLY better than the pit of despair that is Eugene and the University of Oregon. Their football stadium was cool, the village which has all these different shops was welcoming, and the weather was nothing short of perfect. We got all you can eat sushi with Connor, played the new Mario Kart (John also sucks at that one btw) on Parker’s Switch 2, and sat around drinking for the rest of that Saturday. On Sunday, Parker, John, and I took the train around downtown Seattle, walked around and then drank at a bar near the Mariners’ stadium and watched the last Mariners-Red Sox game of the series. I saw UW’s law school, their Greek Rows, and a couple of Seattle’s nicer neighborhoods. All in all, it was a great weekend, and one was much needed to get away from summer work and law school life and the terrible Louisville weather as of late.

But over the course of this week, as I’ve slowly recovered and gotten back into the routine of things, my mind has reflected back to last weekend and what could’ve been. What if, instead of going to Louisville, I had gone to UW instead? What if I had actually cared about the LSAT and studied and gotten in there? What if I didn’t screw up my first semester, what if I went to a different undergrad, what if I applied for those jobs sooner, what if I had gotten that done earlier, and the list goes on, and on, and on. WHAT IF… is a very tempting question. Because you could think endlessly about the different paths you could have taken, it’s easy to wonder where those roads would have led you. Especially in the context of now.

I can only speak for myself in describing this feeling, but there’s something about finishing 2L year that is so disappointing. You’ve already gone through so much, yet you’re still far from being done. You’ve accomplished so much, but it feels like the bare minimum to get through it. You watch as the amount of debt you’re in continues to grow, yet you really can’t do anything currently to pay it off. You sit and think anxiously about the endless possibilities of what you could do with your career, yet you feel stuck in the cycle of school + “learning experience” job until you get there. So the allure of “what if” and mental escape becomes tempting. Because reality is very scary sometimes.

But difficulty is necessary, and fantasy is not reality.

The Seattle fantasy of a “more prestigious” law school, better environment, and perfect life would not be what I would imagine it as, just as although the grass may look greener on another side, doesn’t mean that it always is.

Part of accepting life for what it is is understanding that one is always going to encounter problems, frustrations, and difficulty. If, in some alternate reality, I went there instead, there would be the same obstacles of trying to complete law school with (likely) even more debt than I have now. If I never had gone to law school, I would still be in a career with its own coworkers, environment, and work that is never always rewarding. Experiencing a different city has its drawbacks and benefits, and that certainly exists with Seattle as well as Louisville. I had close to a perfect weekend, but that took months of planning and a huge financial cost just to experience it for two days with a lot of things going right for it to come together. Even then, getting there meant a six-hour delay, a plane that broke down, and a first flight that lasted all of twenty minutes, and it was still worth every bit of it. Life is about the good moments and the bad. It’s getting through difficulty and enjoying it for what it is. It’s about finding the people who truly care to spend it with, the ones you can go two years without seeing and still fall back in with in two seconds, and finding purpose where you can. There are times when circumstances get tough, that you’re trudging through the valley, but a life with no difficulty is not living at all, but rather simply drifting through existence until it ends. And imagining a different life where things are hypothetically better is to discredit the choices, good and bad, that you’ve made to get where you are now. What would be a more productive use of time is to imagine a future life that is better, and taking steps toward a happier future by putting the work in to make your own grass greener.

– Colby