BY: ADRIAN SMITH
I remember feeling sort of melancholy after watching the season finale of Master of None, because of the truth behind the idea that there’s no such thing as 100 per cent certainty in life.
In the episode, Dev Shah (played by Aziz Ansari) finds himself unsure about his relationship with Rachel (played by Noël Wells) after being at a friend’s wedding and watching them recite their vows to one another. The vows were romantic, of course, flowery, and confident in expressing their certainty that they were the right ones for each other, and would be for the rest of their lives. As the camera cuts to other couples in attendance, looking at their significant others, the married couple recited lines to each other like, “I’ve never had any doubts, fears or regrets” since meeting and falling in love.
In your twenties it’s almost impossible not to have any doubts, fears or regrets about the choices you’re making, because your path just isn’t clear yet. You can’t know for sure where it’s leading. Life hands you a number of sporadic circumstances and situations that you have to make decisions about based on what you feel is best for you—but you’re never fully sure. And it’s a lot of pressure. No matter how happy you are with that person you’re seeing, how happy they make you and how much you love them, there are going to be doubts about the relationship, and that’s natural.
It’s not a bad thing to have doubts or uncertainty about what you’re doing. How else would we progress and learn about our desires, ourselves, or what qualities we enjoy in another person if we don’t make some mistakes first? Or at least feel unsure enough to seek out whatever it is we feel we need in order to come to a conclusive decision? How do you know you want to live in Toronto in your twenties, if you haven’t first lived in Paris, or London, or Chicago, or even Asia, and understand for certain that you prefer one city to the other? What if in the end you find out a city isn’t for you in general? How do you know the person in front of you is the last person you’re ever going to be with romantically if they’re not the last person you’re ever going to meet?
When Dev voices these uncertainties to his father, along with the fear that he might not actually want to be an actor, his father tells him he is like “the woman sitting in front of the fig tree, staring at all the branches ‘til the tree dies.” He’s referring to Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar—a semi-autobiographical novel she wrote using her own experiences in life to address the question of socially acceptable identity.
The novel examines the life of a woman who wants to create her own identify and her own path in life—instead of becoming what society has always expected of her as a woman. In Master of None, Dev fears that if he eventually ends up marrying Rachel, it will only be because society suggests you should settle down with the person you end up dating in your twenties. Dev’s father makes him pick up a copy of the novel and in the bookstore Dev reads a very telling, and insightful passage from the novel.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
In life, you’re going to want many different things for yourself. You’re going to struggle deciding which one career is best for you, which person is the most compatible, or even which house or apartment speaks more to your character. You’re going to feel indecisive about which book or TV show to start first, because they’re all good and you can learn from each and every one of them. You’re going to be unsure of whether or not you should travel on your own or stay at home working on projects you’ve always imagined yourself doing with friends, like starting a business or diving into some form of creative work. But what you can’t do is sit still and never pick one, in fear of losing another.
You’ll never truly lose all of the options you have because you chose one over the other. You can always go back and start over and try something else. As long as you don’t waste your time paralyzed in fear, considering all these things but never actually choosing any of them. The one fig, or interest, you choose won’t define the rest of your life because you’re not bound to the first choice you make. You can pursue another, and another…and another until you know – or think you know – for sure.
As humans, we have too many interests to just pick one, and need to go after as many as we can before time and responsibly catches up with us. We’re going to have a number of different ideas about what we want to do, who we want to be with, and what we want to become. But in the end, we all need to welcome uncertainty in our lives.
Image sources: revistaxy.com, wordpress.com
