It was March of 2023 when I had a most curious conversation with a brilliant medical intern at one of my jobs as a locum tenens. I could tell from our conversations and mildly through a masked face, that she was years of maturity, experience and consciousness ahead of me, as I imparted my own medical knowledge on her of a baby with microcephaly (a small head). We talked for a while and her eagerness to learn was uncanny, so eventually, I asked her unabashedly how old she was: Almost 50. I asked what she had done before becoming a doctor: A science teacher for +15 years and prior to that a masters in divinity. Woah, divinity? Theology? The world that is often dichotomous to medicine. Well, what brought her finally here at the age of 50 with two teenager kids at home: I felt like i wasn’t doing enough.

In the mid-late 1900s, when education became a focus of families to increase job potentials and change the collar of work that one does, many had dedicated life plans and didn’t often deviate from them. If you were expected to not go to college and help at a family business or the farm, you did. If you were expected to go to college, you picked a job, you went to college, and you generally stuck to it afterwards, assuming no untoward events. The in-between or the idea of multiple careers in a lifetime was seemingly different than it is today – then again, I’ve only lived in the world today, so take all of my theories in this with a grain of salt. Yet, speaking to so many people in the generation before me, it seems there was more focus on stability and less allowance of variations and uncertainty in a career path once it was settled on; something different from where we are now in the 2020s. With time, norms have readjusted and fluctuate with new eras and in the tract of becoming a doctor, there is no exception. When I started down the trail of pursuing medicine in 2007, it was considered “untraditional” to take time off between undergraduate and medical school; now, it is so frequent, it is almost expected.

Throughout time I have come across increasingly more people that have worked multiple careers in a lifetime, or taken seemingly unorthodox paths to go from point A to point B. Life has multiple opportunities to diverge and sometimes a “calling” may come later or change. One of the biggest things I’ve debated with people and thought about overtime is the concern we have over the path of our lives when we focus too much on the destination rather than the journey. I know so many people and times that remark, especially on the path to becoming a Physician, on the sacrifice of time. If I take 2 years off before going to graduate school, when I’m done i’ll be 30. Well, if you don’t take those 2 years off, once you finish school, 2 years later, you’re still going to be 30. Or 40, or 50, or whatever.

So, does time really matter outside of how arbitrary we make it? We try to balance the living young experiences with taking steps forward in other facets of our life that might require us giving up some of that juvenility. Sometimes by fate or life circumstances, we aren’t really at much choice, but sometime we are. At the end of the day when we stop to pause and look at our lives at each decade or turn of the dial, does it really matter how long it took us to get to where we were as long as it was worth it. Does it really matter how long it takes to get there, as long as we finally do.

And, of course, once we are there, who says we won’t be only part way to going somewhere else.

Image Credit: https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/art-spotlight-snail/