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Did you even wonder where you would be if you had taken certain paths in life, or what you would be doing now if you were exposed to certain professions at an early age? What did you want to be when you grew up when you were about 10 years old?
I wanted to be an architect. Of course, there were no architecture courses in grade school or high school and when I found out early on I had the typical “math phobia” and algebra was as dense as a black hole for me, I pretty much gave up that idea. Oh, I’m not stupid - I did well in geometry, but geometry back then dealt mostly with letters (angle A in relation to angle B) and it made sense to me. However, I could never figure out when the train would arrive in Chicago at 40 mph in relation to the train leaving 45 minutes later going 50 mph. If you held a gun to my head and told me to figure it out, I would be a dead woman.
A turning point for me was when they started experimenting in the 1950’s with giving foreign language classes to us 9-year olds and we were asked to pick either Spanish or French. I chose Spanish. This wasn’t the one-hour-a-week thing they did in most school systems where a teacher came in for an hour a week and taught everybody how to say “apple” and “house” in another language. This was full-on grammar and writing and having rudimentary conversations. I found out I had a knack for it and it wasn’t difficult for me to conjugate verbs and memorize vocabulary lists. Since I was also one of the only people in my English class in junior high who could diagram a sentence correctly (they stopped doing that well before my kids were in school) and could sit and read a novel while everyone else retook the test, I figured language was apparently my calling.
I ended up getting a degree in Spanish language and literature with a minor in French literature, and I work in the translation industry, not as a translator, but I handle the material that comes in, proofread some of the completed translations in my two languages and pinch-hit translating things to English occasionally when necessary.
The only other class that absolutely fascinated me in college was Earth Science. Yes, Earth Science! My second calling after the architecture thing would have been geology. If they had sent a geologist into my grade school to explain earthquakes, volcanoes, rock formations, etc., I would be out in the field somewhere, or in charge of a seismographic facility or in a lab doing research. That profession (and all its off-shoots) would have been worth a math tutor to obtain (have you ever seen the math formula for Richter scale calculations?).
I have books on volcanoes, earthquake science, basic geology, earth systems, rocks, minerals, etc. I understand how they figure out the strength and type and epicenter of an earthquake. I’m familiar with various types of volcanoes. I have a book on the geology of all the national parks, and several books from specific parks about the geologic history of the park in question. I’ve been to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park twice and I could happily spend two entire weeks there and ignore the rest of the island. I have been to the Badlands, Colorado National Monument, Bryce and Zion Canyons and Acadia. I’ve been to Glacier National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park and the Cascades. I find the terrain and the history fascinating. I mean, when you’re on the highway driving past massive diagonal slabs of rock through which they have cut the roadway and can see the striae and the various layers of deposits accumulated throughout millions of years, how can you not be in awe of the forces that were necessary to tilt tons and tons of solid rock to that angle? I’m baffled by the fact that the continental-drift theory was only validated and accepted in the 1960s. It’s a young science about really, really old things.
It’s too late for me to become a geologist or earth scientist, and I don’t regret the choices I’ve made. After all, we could have all gone in several directions in life and there’s no sense in complaining, but I sometimes wonder where I would be now and what I would be doing if I were an expert in geologic formations, ground water flow and topography. Maybe it’s just as well I ended up where I am. I might have ended up working for an oil company that’s raping the land and I would grow to hate my job. Maybe it’s better I can just study the subject at my leisure (and not have to do the math).
Where would you be now if you had taken a different path? Do you ever wonder? Did you ever make a choice then ponder the life-path circumstances brought forth by that choice? Do you regret where you are? I don’t, but I still find it interesting to think about from time to time.
