EVERYTHING I'M NOT

He sat there, the epitome of cool, of suave, of everything I'm not: young, tall, handsome and ambitious, well-built and disarmingly confident. I slumped in my chair, sinking with inadequacy. Perfectly composed, eloquently sophisticated, he smiled pleasantly across the table.

"Well, what do you want to do?" he said, lifting a fork of chicken carefully towards his mouth. I had made the mistake of telling him that I was 'bored' and 'a bit fed up'. It suddenly felt like I'd asked for financial advice from a multi-millionaire. We were not equals and both of us knew it. There was to be no circling, no tempo-play or game-theory-analysis while we figured each other out. The unspoken rules were already settled. "What's your goal, what's your dream?" he asked, his blue eyes sparkling.

"I don't know," I sighed.

It's true too - I don't know how to answer that question any more. It fills me with a kind of dread and sorrow I can't explain. Nick was trying to help me aim for something - but I was deeply aware of the past, the dreams that had crumbled in my hands and my confusion about which of them to let go of and which to hold on to. I was suddenly plagued with all kinds of insecurity and doubts I couldn't cope with.

I diverted the conversation.

"Well, what's your goal?" I asked.

He told me.

I didn't feel much better. His goal is to retire by the time he's 40 with multiple properties, businesses and organisations he's started, move to a cabin in the woods and live an outdoors life, travelling, seeing the world and living every day as an adventure. Perhaps put another way, he doesn't want to grind his years out, working for someone else just like everybody else does. He wants freedom.

I think he'll do it as well. He's not a starry-eyed teenager with a head full of ideas and a future full of difficult lessons. He's in his late twenties, he's driven, confident and unassailably charming. He knows exactly where he wants to be and he knows precisely how to get there.

My nose was itching with hay fever and my eyes were tired. I felt old, lonely and impossibly lost. Why couldn't I be like that? Why couldn't I be so single-minded and ambitious, so composed and so focused? Why couldn't I have a dream to aim for? I'm not saying that I want to be rich - neither was Nick actually, although he undoubtedly is already. He knows, like I do, that money is a tool, not the goal, and that there's so much more to life than chasing after it.

The difference is that he did something about it. Oh, and that he happens to be everything I'm not.