The Answer I'm Looking For

Marco Mora-Mendoza

August 9th, 2018

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Do you also have that feeling that you've been waiting for something?

Waiting until you finish your degree, or until you get a good job and have a nice car, or until you've traveled around the world, or until you have your life together before even considering following through with those plans you’ve kept hidden in the back of your mind. Maybe making music, or writing a book, or starting that non-profit. Perhaps you don't even know what you're waiting for, yet you feel that it's out there, somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

So you wait, and wait. And when it’s time to choose a major you pick one you can live with but still wait to see if a better one comes along. Ditto for jobs. And relationships. Or anything else you reluctantly decide to do but are not completely sure about.

So you wait, and wait, and keep waiting. The feeling of dissatisfaction constantly creeps up on you, never letting you commit to anything. You don’t believe in any of the work you do and therefore it is just mediocre, not because you are less talented or less hardworking, but because you are holding back, waiting.

But that thing that you are waiting for never comes. You find yourself going through the daily motions of your routine on autopilot, following the advice and the direction of others, hoping that the answer you are waiting for will come to you. Someday.

I was like that.

I told myself that before I could do anything big, before I could contribute anything important to the world, I had to fulfill a vague checklist looming in the back of my mind. Like most subconscious thoughts this list was neither logical nor clearly defined, but somewhere in it two requirements stood above the rest: the need to have enough “world experience” and the need to discover my one true passion in life. I’ve had the opportunity to think deeply about both needs these past couple of months.

I realized that the first need, the need to have enough “world experience,” had been following me since childhood.

I grew up on the West coast, close to the border that divides México and the United States. I have happy memories of traveling up and down the region with my family, from the foggy landscape of the San Francisco Bay to the tropical beaches of Mazatlán, México. I didn't have the chance to venture further; the farthest eastward I had been was Las Vegas sometime when I was around fourteen. Over the years I wondered what lay beyond the places I had visited. I thought that out there, outside America, I would be able to find the answer to the wait. I thought the answer was in Europe.

Europe had become a dream. Not in the sense of a lifelong goal, but more like an illusion. A utopia. I developed a misconception of the continent early on and put it on a pedestal. How couldn't I? Growing up we had learned all about its history in school. It seemed to me that Europe was where everything happened. The center of the universe. A wide land full of rich stories where civilization had sprung and evolved, from the Greek and Roman empires to the modern countries that survive today. Older relatives and family friends talked about their european travels with an unintentional air of presumptuousness, much like how we Americans occasionally use the British accent to denote fanciness. Newspaper articles and international statistics pushed this narrative further. Finland has the best education system; Germany's economy is rock-solid; France, Britain, Spain, and Italy are brimming with so many iconic historical landmarks that millions of tourists flood there every year. I even remember my mother talking about her lifelong dream of living in the rich italian countryside, enjoying every aspect of it from the delicious italian cuisine to the beauty of the maximum expressions of Renaissance art. Add to this mix of formal and informal education the inferiority complex that Mexicans have from their historical ties to the Spanish monarchy and you can understand why I thought I had to visit Europe before I could have a say in the world.

I've had the wonderful privilege of living abroad in Europe for the past five months, going from city to city and traveling to more than eight countries altogether. After thousands of miles, hundreds of conversations, dozens of pictures and a myriad of memories that will surely last a lifetime I have to say:

The answer was not here.

European countries are just that, countries. Each of them has its own problems and preoccupations. I was surprised to see that most places I've been to look very much like some places I’ve seen in the US. People here might also be rude, the streets still have potholes, and homelessness remains an issue in both big and small cities. What did I expect? I don't know. My reasoning was clouded by my infatuation. Now it has been slowly adjusting to reality.

The second requirement of finding my passion has been eroding even more slowly, but it was only until recently that I realized it did not ring true to me anymore.

I had indirectly learned, as most of us did, that we were supposed to find an activity so captivating that we would enjoy spending the rest of our time doing it. Ideally you would find it before college and all your subsequent decisions in life would be based on it. This idea of having a passion could be summarized by the following quote:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it… have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

- Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

I believed in this quote. I memorized it. I printed it out and put it on my dorm room wall. When the feeling of dissatisfaction returned I repeated it in my head, holding on to its words in the hope that they would eventually come true. I was so committed to it that I didn't realize I had misinterpreted it. You can love many things, and there's no point in waiting for one thing you might love to do the most. Meaning is constructed one day at a time with every step we take, not found. I realized that, like Steve Jobs said, if I am already making decisions following my heart and intuition, I am already following my passion in my daily life.

I grew tired of waiting. I’ve been waiting all my life. Waiting until I traveled. Waiting to find that one thing I loved. Waiting to see if suddenly this feeling would go away. The truth is the answer is not out there in some other country or hidden between the lines of a book, and there probably won't be a singular moment when I will realize what I am meant to do in life.

To my friends back home who have never been abroad and signal with their enthusiastic expressions about my trip that they feel they are missing out on life: the answer is not out here. You won't find it in the streets of Paris or the coasts of Italy. My experience abroad has been wonderful, but it didn't give me the answer I was looking for.

I cannot hold back any longer for a moment that might never come. I fear looking back with regret at all those wasted years of just getting by, trying to find an answer when the answer was mine to define all along. I can keep waiting to find it somewhere, or I can go ahead and commit fully to life without all these expectations, doing my best at what's at hand and trusting that my decisions will take me wherever I want to go.

So I’ve decided to stop waiting, and start living.