Running Away, Running True

I think about regrets a lot.

Not in some grand reckoning kind of way. More in the ordinary way a person does when he gets old enough to see how small decisions turn into bigger ones, and bigger ones slowly become a life. I can look back on almost every stretch of my life and see where I should have been steadier, braver, less foolish.

And if I’m honest, it doesn’t take many changed decisions to start changing everything.

Even a few would have thrown the trajectory off. A different job taken. A different relationship held onto or let go of. A different move made earlier or later. A few degrees one way or the other, and maybe I do not end up here at all.

But I would not trade here away.

Because here means Raven and Xander.

Not just children in the abstract, but these children. I was old enough by then to know that the best things don’t always show up when you expect them, or looking the way you expected. They were not part of some clean master plan. They were a disguised gift. An old dad’s gift.

That is what makes regret so slippery. It wants to edit the past selectively. It wants to remove the bad judgment, the wrong turns, the pain. But it rarely admits that if you start pulling on those threads, you may also unravel the parts of your life you would now protect at all costs.

So no, I don’t believe in “no regrets.” I have regrets. Plenty of them. But I also know that if too many things had gone too differently, I might have ended up with a life that looked cleaner on paper and felt less like mine.

Years ago, when I was leaving Andersen Consulting, the HR manager doing my exit interview asked what I was going to do next. I told him the truth: I didn’t really know. I just knew what I wasn’t going to be doing.

He had the calm compassion of an uncle or a trusted advisor, and there was no judgment in it. He said he had found it was better to run toward something than away from something.

It was one of those lines you carry around for years because it sounds so obviously wise.

But over time I realized that idea had misled me. It made me feel like I needed a polished reason for every departure, as if leaving only counted when it came wrapped in a clear vision. As if it was respectable to say, “I’m being called toward this next thing,” but less respectable to admit:

I cannot keep being this version of myself in this place.

So I worked far too hard to manufacture things to run toward.

Not always dishonestly. Sometimes there really was something ahead. But just as often, I would rehearse the explanation before anyone even asked. I’d have the respectable version ready: the opportunity, the growth, the better fit, the next chapter. I put far more work into constructing that story than into admitting the simpler truth that I couldn’t stay.

I wanted the story to sound like aspiration instead of refusal. I wanted to be able to explain myself in a way that made sense not only to other people, but to me.

But what was true was simpler than that: I was trying to get away from something that felt wrong. Something misaligned. Something that was asking me to accept a life that did not fit.

I’m less embarrassed by that now than I used to be, because I’ve come to think that running away from something is not always cowardice, confusion, or failure to plan. Sometimes it’s the first honest refusal. Sometimes it’s how a person stays true to himself before he has the words to explain what he is protecting.

I do not think I was built especially well for long-term toleration of what feels false.

That has cost me. Sometimes I left too soon. Sometimes I mistook restlessness for insight. Sometimes I created motion where what was really needed was endurance. I am not trying to turn every exit in my life into an act of courage.

But I am also done pretending every departure was a mistake just because it was messy.

Some of what looked like avoidance from the outside was probably fidelity from the inside. Those departures just stopped the drift toward a life that was becoming unrecognizable as mine.

And maybe that is the shape of my life: not a clean story of marching toward one grand vision, but a long, uneven mixture of running toward and running away. Running toward partial goods. Running away from bad fits. Running toward possibility. Running away from who I did not want to become.

One of the clearest “toward” moves of my twenties was leaving Chicago, where home and family and friends were clustered, and moving to Colorado. It taught me that I could create a future in a new place. Colorado has, in the end, become my real home, even after I wandered away from it a few times.

At sixty, it’s tempting to add all of that up against some old private fantasy of what I was supposed to become. I carried that longer than I want to admit. The idea that by now I should have done something grand. Built something bigger. Become someone more impressive. Left a clearer mark.

Then you look around and there you are, still struggling through parts of life you thought would have been settled by now.

That hits hard.

But more and more I think that scoreboard was wrong. Or at least wrong for me now.

The life I have is not the life I envisioned. It is not tidy. It does not resolve into a simple lesson. It is full of flaws, detours, compromises, and regrets.

But it is also the life that gave me these two babies as an old dad. That was not the future I once pictured. It may be better.

The question is no longer whether my life adds up to something grand in the old sense. It is whether I can be equal to the life I actually have. Whether I can stop measuring myself by what I might still prove, and become the kind of father this part of my life requires.

A great dad. A present dad. A long-enough-living dad.

That is not a consolation prize. That is not me lowering the bar. That is me finally understanding the scale that matters.

Maybe the story of my life is not that I always knew where to go.

Maybe it’s that whenever something started feeling false, I eventually found it harder and harder to stay.

And maybe, through all the wrong turns, necessary exits, and the occasional brave move toward something real, that was enough to bring me here.

An old dad, still unfinished, and standing in front of the part that matters most.

The work now isn’t to explain the path. It’s to walk the next part of it well.