If the measure of a boy becoming a man is when he accepts the lot his life has given him, then I’ve grown younger with each passing year.

I grew up wondering when I’d cross that line between being a child and an adult. With each year that passed, I waited to feel different; I waited for the day I’d settle down, the day I’d work a job for the sake of earning a living, the day I’d stop playing and enter the real world.

When I graduated high school, I thought I’d become a man in college. When I left college, I got engaged and thought I’d become a man when I married. When I was divorced, I thought I’d finally arrived at my adulthood.

But when I was younger, those were the days I took too seriously. Those were the days when I fought life, when I acted — and tried to act — the part I thought everyone wanted me to play. Those were the days I took on responsibilities that weren’t mine, the days I told myself this was the life I deserved, the days I worked jobs I didn’t enjoy for far too long because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.

I thought I knew my path back in those days, and I believed my happiness lay somewhere in my future if only I followed that path. I pushed away love, pushed away dreams, pushed away so many of the things that might have brought me happiness in each moment of my life, because I believed then that those were distractions. I believed the idea that a man works hard and sacrifices his youth so that he can be happy when he grows old.

I remember going back to see her graduation, the first girl I really fell for… standing in the door telling her I was engaged and listening her talk about her Brazilian boyfriend. I remember the air tinged with melancholy; thoughts of what might have been, thoughts of ‘if only’ — but I kept on in the direction I’d chosen.

I remember even before that, stopping by to visit another friend, a young woman who seemed so worldly and intelligent that she dazzled me (and frightened me a little, the first person to make me keenly aware of my rural upbringing, of all the things of the world I hadn’t seen), at a college in Massachusetts, on the eve of my trip down to see the person whom I later married. We walked around the lake, drank lattes and traded philosophical banter. She invited me to stay there for the night. I chose instead to sleep in South Station and boarded the train to Virginia the next morning.

After I turned 30 while living in Maui, I passed out because of dehydration during a yoga class. The paramedic who came to my aid, only a few years older, shook his already-graying head, frowned at me with wrinkles already creasing his face and his eyes, and warned me, “You’re 30 now; you gotta start taking it easier. You can’t do all the things you used to when you were young.”

I’ve long had a deceptively young face. When I was fifteen, people I met assumed I was eighteen; but all through my 20s and into my 30s, I’ve been mistaken for a college student. The people who hit on me tend to be nearly ten years younger. I used to tell co-workers that I’d been married, and they’d respond the same every time: “Wait a minute… you were married?”

As I grew up, I wondered when I’d cross that line, but truthfully I never really wanted to become an adult. I didn’t want to settle, I didn’t want to live a life that wasn’t mine, I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t know at the time that I’d already been living like that for years.

Those were the days that I lived out of fear and obligation. I lay awake at nights worrying about how to pay bills and ensure we’d have enough money for our retirement. I felt my heart aching for another life, inspired by people who lured me in another direction – not one of irresponsibility and craziness, one of adventure and challenge and joy.

Growing up isn’t about giving up or giving in to the expectations others have for us; it’s about taking responsibility for our own joy and our own mistakes. I always thought I’d have to acquiesce, to become a cog in the great machine, in order to become a man. But I found that’s not true.

There’s a point in the process of aging where two roads diverge and we choose the temper of our lives: we either choose to become men and women whose happiness awaits us in the distance, or we choose to seek our dreams now, in this moment.

I was a serious boy. As a young man I spent so much of my time lost in thought. In my early 20s, I mired myself in the muck of overanalysis and the resulting fear. I saw happiness as a distant goal and lived in fear of never achieving my dream.

When I was younger, I felt so much regret.

I don’t have a stable life right now. To be honest, if I look backward at the roads I’ve travelled, there are only a few brief periods of my life that I’d consider safe and stable.

I probably make more mistakes now than I made as a serious younger man, but most of the time I don’t vilify myself for my errors. I don’t spend quite so many sleepless nights worrying about my next day, my next week, my next month.

It seems like most people’s relationships are shortest when they’re young. I started off by marrying for six years. And followed it up with a four-year relationship. And now, only recently, have I had the fortune to experience and learn what it’s like for love to burn intensely and quickly, what it’s like to let go before all the moving in and thoughts of marriage and making two lives work together.

For a few weeks at the beginning of the summer, I wondered if I was going to become a father. The previous summer, as we watched my friend Scott get married, my girlfriend (at the time) and I both hatched up creative ideas of how to propose to each other.

Both marriage and fatherhood used to scare the daylights out of me. I’d long ago made a pact to myself not even to consider marriage again until I was thirty, then extended it to 35 when I rounded that hill. But no longer – it’s not that I seek them out or want those things right now, and perhaps those thoughts were premature and the people not right for me.

So I’ve grown younger and older at the same time. Since I stopped trying to take responsibility for the world’s expectations of me, I’ve taken hold of the reins of my own expectations for myself. And I know how to drive this cart better than anyone else.

I look around and I know there are people who see how I live and shake their heads and wonder what’s possessing me to have made some of the choices I’ve made in the past year. But I can say that in the past several years I’ve made no choices that I wish I hadn’t. I’ve had my share of sorrow, but I don’t see trouble all day long… every joy and every tear has been a wonderful teacher to me.

Since Maui, I’ve (thankfully) rarely wondered what life would be like “if only…” And in the few cases I have, life gave me the chance to find out the answer. That girl whose graduation I attended? We finally had a chance to see what might have happened, 14 years after we originally liked each other.

So when did I cross that line? I’m not sure. I do know that I spent many years as a boy who tried to be a man in the only ways he understood adulthood – giving in, giving up, letting go of silly dreams… and I know that now I’m living my life as a man with all the wonder and curiousity of a young boy.

And I’m not going to take it easy until I have to. I’m not going to grow old before I’m old. Even when a few more decades have passed, I hope I have a young spirit.