John Hawkins - 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

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Published by River Grove Books

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Copyright 2017 John Hawkins

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Print ISBN: 978-1-63299-133-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63299-134-8

First Edition

Thank you to Bob and Ann Hawkins for being a great set of parents.

Thank you to Jewett and John Brown for being the best grandparents any young child could ever want. Thank you to God for everything, especially for being born in a country like America. Last but not least, thank you to my best friend, Tiffiny Ruegner, who always stuck by me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

One day you are going to be old. Well, if youre lucky. If youre not lucky, you could walk into an open manhole or end up getting some spectacular new disease named after you. There are worse ways to go, right?

Assuming that doesnt happen, you will reach middle age, youll look back over your life, and youll say, I wish I knew as much at eighteen as I do today. Lets face it, if youre not saying that, it means youre either completely hopeless because you havent learned anything or you have some sort of head trauma that prevents you from remembering anything. If its the latter, youre borrowing this book, so buy it again.

Oh, I know what youre thinking. Middle-aged? Me? It seems so far awayand most of the forty-year-olds I know have beer guts, the beginning of male pattern baldness, and soul-crushing jobs that at least distract them from what went wrong in their first marriages. Well actually, I assume thats whats going on with them because I dont pay enough attention to old people to care.

Fair point.

Howeverand this may shock youevery forty-year-old on planet Earth was once eighteen like you. Yes, really! Your dad, grandpa, the creepy old guys who walk through the locker room naked letting it all hang out because they dont care anymorethey were all young once.

Wait, am I depressing you? Does thinking about that upset you a little? Really, its not so bad... or at least it doesnt have to be. I will tell you that as you get older, most of the problems you have in life will be a direct result of mistakes you made upstream. Those little choices you make today, so small, so tiny, so insignificant that you dont even notice themthey accumulate over the course of a lifetime.

All of it happens faster than you think. One day youre eighteen years old, graduating from high school. The next day youre getting your first job. Soon after, youre thinking about getting married. Next, in the blink of an eye, youre forty years old in the middle of a midlife crisis wondering whether you should have fulfilled your childhood dream of becoming a circus acrobat.

In retrospect, its pretty easy to see where you went wrong. After all, you think you know everything at eighteen, except the stuff you dont know, which youre confident that youll figure out when the time comes.

Being eighteen is not just an age, though; its a mentality. The world is your oyster at that age. Thats the message you get from music, from TV, from movies. You see all these people up on the silver screen who are your age, who look like they could be your friends, who are doing all these great things. Meanwhile, you feel young, vibrant, and almost invincible. Your whole life is in front of you, and it seems like there are infinite possibilities.

Getting older isnt quite like that. Thats not to say its bad. Its just different. The good news is that you know a lot more about life at forty than you did at twenty. Part of that is raw knowledge, but experience is irreplaceable. Deeply loving another human being, being the only person for miles in a forest, having a gun pointed at you, trying and succeeding, achieving dreams years in the making, doing things nobody else seemed to think you could dosome things you just have to feel if you want to truly know and understand. Still, if youre around long enough, you start to realize there are no magic bullets. When youre younger, you may think that if you had money, a big house, a beautiful woman, a dream vacation... if you could have thousands of people listening to you, could have this experience, talk to that person, do this thing, then everything would be wonderful.

The truth is thats all crap.

It reminds me of a coat I wanted when I was eighteen. It was leather with an American flag on the back, and I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I couldnt afford the coat and that upset me so much, I kid you not, I got choked up and a tear rolled down my cheek. To me, that coat wasnt a coat; it was a representation of all the things I wanted that I couldnt have. Long story short, I got my hearts desire and... I didnt wear it all that often because it was leather and the city I was living in had mild winters. After a couple of years, someone stole the coat from my dorm room. I wasnt particularly happy about that, but I wasnt exactly broken up either. I certainly didnt make any move to go buy another coat. Today, when I think back about that coat, the first word that comes to mind is cheesy.

This is what life is like. It always looks greener on the other side of the fence, no matter which side of the fence youre on. Thats not to say that nothing will bring you pleasure long term in life, but be careful what you use to fill gaps inside you, because over time, no matter how permanent it seems, it will probably turn out to be a patch. Thats why youd better learn to like yourself and enjoy the day-to-day journey instead of reaching for a brass ring thats going to almost inevitably disappoint you in the end.

If youre twenty, all of this probably sounds perfectly awful or perhaps implausible. By the time youre forty, youre going to be on a yacht somewhere getting a massage from your hot spouse, thinking about your next vacation and how youre going to cure cancer while youre listening to the wonderful news about how a new cloning breakthrough will allow everyone to live until four hundred. I certainly hope thats how things turn out for you, but if you have a more conventional lifestyle at forty, remember thats not so bad either.

Once you get to this age, you know yourself better; you dont care as much what other people think of you; hopefully you wont have a spool or a couch you found on the side of the road in your living room; and youll have enough experience to get a handle on life. Plus, there are a lot of rewards in life that go beyond what youre going to see at a party, drunk at a club at two a.m., or on MTV. Being middle-aged isnt the end of the good life; its just another chapter of the book that will be the story of you one day.