...and that has made all the difference

I am, by all admission, a product of the choices I've made in my life. Ever the faithful Plan II major, I've always made an effort to follow the paths of life in such a way that I leave as many options available to myself as possible. Inevitably, there comes a time that I have to make a decision that nullifies the other possibilities. How does one deal with that?

It's not that I'm unhappy with the life I find myself leading at 25. In fact, I have a great job, working with people I genuinely like and respect, in a city I love. (If you'd told me about this job a few years ago, it would've definitely been in the running for my lifetime dream-job. Then again, dream-jobs are all glory and no drudgery, and real jobs have a bit of each to balance each other out.) And really, is 25 old enough for me to start feeling the tinges of a mid-life crisis?

For me, I think the biggest fear is that I'll settle down before I'm ready to. As it stands, I have an apartment full of stuff that I can't just leave behind. It's not even that I have some final destination set. It just bothers me that it's not as simple as just packing up and leaving if I want to.

In a perfect world, I could take a year or two off of work to see the world. I'd backpack across Europe, see Asia, kayak and scuba dive in some fabulous, exotic locales, and then come back, if I feel like it at the end. In reality, it's not quite that easy.

So maybe it's that I'm 25, that my mom had a baby when she was my age, that several of my coworkers are having babies these days. Or maybe it's watching the kids around here as they take their own life-paths and make choices that will change the courses of their own histories. Or maybe it's just that, before I make some momentous decision to meet someone, marry, settle down, and have 2.5 children, a dog, a cat, and a hedgehog named Hedgewig, I want to explore my options. All of them.

How else can I discover what the world holds for me?