Childhood Optionality

I graduated high school a little over a month ago. It still hasn’t sunk in. Part of me doesn’t want it to sink in. Childhood, once feeling like a long runway of foreverness, has now reached its ending, and I’m experiencing a very bumpy takeoff to say the least.

But what really makes childhood, and by extension high school special? Believe me, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and the answer definitely isn’t the $2 dollar pizza or the mountainous pile of work in APUSH. I can sum up this specialness with one word.

Optionality

When you’re a kid, the world seems open and expansive, your dreams are given space to grow and flourish in your mind, unhindered by the harsh truths of reality.

I’ve personally noticed, how as we age, little parts of our dreams wither away and die. Slowly.. gradually.. society, our peers, our parents work away at our dreams until we have a very watered down version of the life we envisioned when we were a child. Ideas we had while we were young are suddenly

• not “feasible” enough
• not “secure” enough
• too “hard” for us to achieve

As we (or our environment) begin to limit our options, our envelope of imagination begins to constrict.

High school can be seen as the inflection point of this graph. We’re literally at the cusp of our careers, … the cusp of our life.

The summer before we all head off to college, our optionality, our vision for the future is open and expansive.

These possibilities, these options are what make childhood special. You’re charting a course in childhood, you’re finding yourself, you’re thinking about who you want to be. You’re looking forward to,.. imagining the future.

Your envelope of imagination is increasing.