“This is the best time of your life,” the speaker said, staring up at the rows of teenagers gathered for Wednesday chapel. I stared back from my seat on the bleachers, trying to match this stranger’s words to my experiences.

How would I know if high school is the best time of my life? I hadn’t even lived two decades on this planet yet. I didn’t hate my life as it was. I didn’t hate my routines and relationships, and yet I didn’t want these days to be the peak. If this is the best time of my life, how disappointing will the rest of life be?

At age twelve, Peter Ostrum starred in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As a teenager, he traveled to California to consider restarting his acting career. But by then, acting was a backup plan. The teenage Ostrum dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, and he found the success he longed for: he earned a doctorate of veterinary medicine from Cornell and began practicing in upstate New York.

“Acting was fine, but I wanted something more steady, and the key is to find something that you love doing, and that’s what my profession has given to me,” Ostrum said in a 2000 interview. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is still Ostrum’s only film credit.

When I wrote my first piece for the post calvin, I worried that I had used up my one good idea. For years, I had dreamed about writing something about my drive to Iowa and my love of the I-80 stretch, and my post calvin audition piece was my chance to try. Once I finished, I struggled to find the next big, ambitious idea, something to wrestle and dance with on the page and in my mind. Maybe I wouldn’t ever be that proud of an essay again.

That was almost four years ago. Almost fifty essays ago. And some of them I consider much, much stronger than “Solitude and I-80.”

At age twenty-nine, snowboarder Nick Baumgartner participated in the Winter Olympics for the first time–finishing twentieth in his event. At age thirty-two, he competed in the Winter Olympics for the second time, failing to advance to the quarterfinals. At age thirty-six, he participated in the 2018 Winter Olympics–finishing fourth, just off the podium. At age forty, in the inaugural mixed snowboard cross event, Baumgartner claimed an Olympic medal at last. The color? Gold. 

I miss the proximity of my friends in my college years: I could see so many wonderful faces at least once per week—sometimes more than that. Now I struggle to see some of my closest friends more than twice a month. But I don’t miss the stress of constant assignments, and I don’t miss the chaos of two, sometimes three, work schedules. I don’t miss struggling to balance the health of my relationships with the quality of my work.

The Golden Age is behind us; the Golden Age is before us.

At age eleven, upon the release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Emma Watson became one of the world’s most famous children. Ten years later, at age twenty-one, she began taking classes at Brown University, taking occasional breaks to act and eventually graduating at age twenty-four. Watson’s role in the film series had earned her plenty of money; she had no need for an education to help her make a career. But she wanted the experience anyway.

“I would just go crazy if I didn’t have a reality, if I didn’t have a life outside of the roles I play,” she said in a 2012 Glamour interview. “The entertainment industry is pretty nuts, and having had that experience outside of it and going to university has really made a big difference. It’s important to me to feel like I have my own life.”

Our nostalgia for the past must not discolor the beauty of the present. The best days of our lives are behind us; the best days of our lives are before us. But the best days of our lives are rarely one-after-the-other, long sequences of glorious moments all clustered together. Happy days and sad days are rarely obedient to our rules, least of all our rules about timing.

At age twelve, Key Huy Quan starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. As he grew older, he continued to love acting, but as an Asian American actor, he struggled to find fulfilling roles in the United States. Quan transitioned into film production work—perhaps his onscreen days were behind him. After the success of Crazy Rich Asians, however, Quan began to reconsider his acting career. Maybe there could be a place for someone like him. Two weeks after getting a talent agent again, Quan auditioned for a film called Everything, Everywhere All at Once and was cast as Waymond Wang. The role would earn Quan wide critical acclaim, including a Golden Globe Award and Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. 

“For so many years, I was afraid I had nothing more to offer, that no matter what I did, I would never surpass what I achieved as a kid,” Quan said in his Golden Globe acceptance speech. “Thankfully, more than thirty years later, two guys thought of me. They remembered that kid, and they gave me an opportunity to try again. Everything that has happened since has been unbelievable.”

Sometimes we do not control the reasons our pasts, presents, and futures fail to align. Some dreams fade with time, but some dreams die like Langston Hughes’s raisin in the sun, crushed by forces we must protest as cruel. In many ways, grief is the reverse side of hope, for it rightly acknowledges that some features of the past are better—or worse—than the present. Our lives (as both grief and hope understand) are not linear narratives tracing good to better to best, or even bad to okay to good to better to best. Our lives are constellations of stories and plots, all developing at the same time but rarely at the same rate.

Injustice and tragedy can restrict the limits of our imaginations, pressuring joy to stay in the past and the past alone. But joy is more rebellious than we expect it to be. Hope demands that our memories push us beyond the past, towards a present and future with joys of their own.

Courtney Zonnefeld

Courtney Zonnefeld graduated in 2018 with a degree in writing. She currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works for Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking, and saving up for more herb plants. You can usually find her wandering a farmer’s market, hunting for vintage books, or browsing the tea selection in coffee shops.