Chocolate and Peanut Butter

Well, I mixed my metaphors yesterday but fortunately, the outcome seems more like chocolate and peanut butter than a young boy and green vegetables. I wrote about a deep yearning and then described it as something with which I wished to negotiate. A reasonable question would be, "If it was something you truly wanted, why would you try and run from it?"

The short answer is I thought it was unobtainable. Aristotle said, "Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities." I certainly thought becoming a doctor in mid-life, especially after having spent a lifetime in liberal arts with no science background, was a probable impossibility. That's why, when the desire appeared on my radar, I thought it was more reasonable to compromise than take a leap of faith.

So, I pursued and obtained an admission to a doctoral program in psychology and was about to begin classes when it occurred to me: this is like marrying the girl next door because she's convenient instead of the one across town that I loved, and then spending the rest of my life trying to turn the one into the other. If I knew anything at all, it was I couldn't do that either to the girl next door or to myself.

The fact is, I had arrived at the convergence of Robert Frost's "two paths in a wood," and something told me it was now or never. The price for staying on the well-trodden path was more than I could afford. Sink or swim, live or die, come heaven or hell, it was time.