This post has been adapted from my piece in a May 2014 booklet of advice distributed to UVA graduates.
When I was a boy, I played a game called Super Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a vivid side-scroller (think Mario) about a futuristic bounty hunter in pursuit of dangerous creatures beneath surface of a barren, alien planet Zebes. Despite being armed with a laser canon and a metal suit of armor, you quickly realize your character is woefully unprepared to survive the depths you're about to explore.
As the game progresses you stumble across routes deeper into Zebes, only to find they are impossible to traverse due to numerous, perilous obstacles. For example, sometimes you simply don't have the equipment to open the extra-terrestrial doors. Cliffs can be too high to scale. Powerful enemies may be too fast to outrun down a corridor. The extreme heat of the depths may melt away your character's health.
To add insult to injury, you know there are treasures and plot points in these unexplorable chambers. In fact, sometimes you can see the treasure you can't reach. Yet somehow you're just not big enough or strong enough to make it... if you try you fail.
The game is powerful in this way, as it evokes both hope and restraint by exposing you to routes you want to explore now, but simply are not ready for yet. You try, you die, you try again, you die, you relent and must journey deeper into the darkness with what you have and accept that maybe when you come back maybe it will be different... maybe you will be different.
The entire game progresses this way. Always seducing you with an impossible obstacle that you try to overcome too early, coming up short until you decide another path may be better. As a child you feel yourself betraying your naive curiosity, leaving many stones unturned along your journey. But over time you learn that actually nothing goes unexplored; no mysteries are left untouched inside the blackness of Planet Zebes. Those doors you couldn't open? You get the technology from a boss in a sealed off dungeon. Those cliffs you couldn't scale? The rocket boots are hidden many, many hours to the game. The extreme heat? You upgrade your armor and swim through the magma like a fish.
As I've transitioned to adulthood I've thought back to Super Metroid, realizing I had to prepare myself to play another type of game.
For the first 20ish years of your existence, life plays a lot like Super Mario. It's linear, it's simple, it's fun. The "next thing" is just around the corner, you just have to move forward. Next semester always brings new friends, new clubs, new opportunities.
But life after college is an adventure into the depths - and I've found it to be a darker reality that is best embraced like good ol' Super Metroid. Like the doors or cliffs, you see many places you want your life to take you, but frankly are powerless to pursue. You want that job, that lifestyle, that lover, that vacation, that family, that skill, that peace of mind. You will be tempted by the world's treasures long before you're savvy enough to seize them. It can be debilitating. Sitting in a cubicle at my first consulting gig, I wondered how the hell I get from there to dreams I conjured every lunch break.
This is fine. It's fine that the course is not so linear. It's fine that you move forward and you move backward. It's fine you run into obstacles and you get crushed by them - utterly devastated that you chose wrong. What I've found is that as you go further with what you have, rather than get discouraged with what you don't, you acquire new skills, new allies, new experiences. Paths that previously were daunting, if not impossible, become very pedestrian. Destinies are mastered as a slow, measured march into the unknown.
To many, Super Metroid is a game about blasting aliens. To me it's a story of growth. It's about doing what you can with what you have now, and being willing to journey farther knowing you'll find what you need along the way. It's a story of redemption. The demons of your past, those chains that keep you from going where you want; you vanquish them with every new discovery. Finally, it's a story of reflection. Each seemingly impossible obstacle is as much mental as it is physical as you summon strength from the triumphs you've celebrated before.
The obstacles... they make you strong. This world is big and bad - but it's an adventure where, if you push forward, it lets you smile at the hardships of the past and press on through hurdles of the future.
