Starched white coats and neat black bowties greeted me as I sat down at Newark’s Sullivan’s steakhouse. Forty minutes to spare before the plane takes off. Busy servers paced back and forth, dragging aromas of grilled steaks and sautéed onions, of butter and pepper across the brightly lit room; they walked stiffly with trays of crab cakes and lemon drenched grouper and steamed lobster on upturned hands. A Latino girl with streaked hair cleared finished tables with sincere briskness. A middle aged couple sat across from me, poking their salad gingerly and looking beyond the vast windows towards the lumbering 737s making their way towards the grey takeoff strip. Their Vuitton bags sat stranded in the aisle, leaning against each other like a bored monument to tired travelers. Behind them sat two hotshots in grey pinstriped suits. One was gesturing jerkily, stabbing at his french fries while delivering rapid-fire commands into his PDA cell phone. His partner stared straight ahead blankly while he sipped a beer, fingering his cufflinks. Their shoes were amazingly polished. I was the only one wearing a t-shirt. I wondered why I was here, if I should be eating at all, except for the fact that I wanted a steak sandwich. Doubtless there will be food on the plane. And yet, here I am, acting like I was still one of them. One of the select: a class in which success meant financial independence, where $30 lunches were the norm, and cravings were always satisfied. Except I can’t afford to be like them any longer. I identified more with the waiters who blended into the background – the cooks who were laughing in the kitchen – and not with the businessmen in their leather attaches or the vacationers heading off to whitewashed beaches. It dawned. The days of expense accounts and five-star dinners are over, and I have to adjust to the want of material things because I have, in good faith, rejected the need for material satisfaction. I can’t buy just because I want: gadgets, meals, clothes – affection. It’s because I look for happiness in totality that I have to reject the material part that has made me happy at the expense of everything else. As the planes took off, each aiming for a different destination, crossing but never meeting in the vast canopy sky, I became morose and brooded with St. Agustine: “For it is error to follow anything that brings us not to that which we have the will to attain. And so far as one errs the more in the way of life so much the less is he wise; because he is so much the more remote from the truth, in which the highest good is discerned and held. But it is by the attaining and the holding of the highest good that one is made happy, which, beyond controversy, is the aim of us all.” My life, my decisions and all of its consequences, will be entirely my own. We all live alone, and whatever we do, or however we think, our lives are individual corpuscles floating in the immense infinite space of possibilities. I was born alone, and into death I go alone. Since birth, I have been led to believe that there was a support structure of family and friends and love, that there were examples to follow – that my living was in relation somehow to others like me, and I had thought naively that I could emulate, that I could learn from others who had gone before me. I learned to walk with encouragement, to speak with help, and to think with lessons. But in all those things, it was I who performed the task. My own two feet, my own tongue, and my own mind – I did everything in solitude. And in the stark airport restaurant, I was utterly alone. There is no roadmap for the decisions that I make. There may be similar circumstances in which those who have gone before have endured, but it’s never complete, and it’ll never replace the experiences and choices that are uniquely mine. I thought of my brother and his parties at Sotheby’s and Christies’, of my parents and their struggles during political upheavals, of countless peers who are at private equity shops and business schools – and I thought of how amazingly my life will be different from theirs. Not because I want it to be but because I can’t see it any other way. I took this all in, and like breathing rarefied air for the first time, there was a suffocating realization that I am alone in a strange life, one that I did not expect or was adequately prepared for. We all think we are wise. The philosophers because they seek truth; the businessmen because they control money; the politicians because they debate justice and civic responsibilities; and the creatives because they are slaves to beauty. But I know that I am not wise, nor am I happy. I have glimmers of what could be, but sometimes, it is as if I reach blindly in the dark for the walls of my cage while everyone else is in the light. And so I retreat. I take refuge in the immediate present, the reactions and not the foresights. I surround myself with books and music and photos – I lose myself in stories and songs and pictures, hoping that this lonely path leads somewhere, trusting that I have graduated beyond simple wants and expectations, and knowing that I have a lot to learn and re-learn. It’s funny. I remember when my high school buddies – how we would sit late at nights on our cars, smoking, and think of how we would be when we became twenty-five. Would we find the same jokes funny; would we be rich or rebellious? Would we make it and survive? Would things stay the same? And as we go on with our lives, will we be happy? Now at the age of twenty-four, I remembered that those times were curiously happy times, and that growing up didn’t feel as empty, decisions were easy, and that we always believed in making it. I suppose growing up has lost some of its luster, and as we grow, we grow apart. And yet, I have the hope that we will grow into ourselves, and like our existence in which we did not have a say, so too do we not have the choice but to grow, to learn, and to do those things ably.