“So! Do you think you’re an ambitious person?”

A quiet beat while I register his question, and then the hollow clip of plastic as the sushi arrives. Theo was not as I remembered him from school. He had taken on an unmistakable worldliness that distorted the impression I retained of his wide grins and ringing giggles. This was our first meeting in over a year, so the speed at which he arrived at the question briefly stunned me.

“We’ve entered the gaping, unstructured territory of our twenties”

I’m home for the summer, which translates to a standard formula: work, internships, nights spent recharging with family, walks you can take on autopilot with run-ins that dredge up memories (old, welcome, and otherwise); and then, of course, there’s the circus of coffees, lunches, and dinners, catching up with friends from home. As an international student whose pre-Cambridge life lies sealed up in Hong Kong, I look forward to these catch-ups with school friends all the more for that they only really happen at this time of year. The summer break is the one time you can be fairly sure that everyone from the bubble of your past life will return from new lives flung to the four corners of the world – a seasonal migration across oceans, like whales or butterflies, home to where you spent the first eighteen years of your lives together.

This summer, I’ve come home to a kind of rekindling phenomenon with the more peripheral companions of childhood. The kind of person you had classes with, but never hung out with one-on-one. These meetings generate conversations both fascinating and surprising because, not having kept in touch at all in some cases, I have no knowledge of what their lives currently look like, how they’ve filled in the time since our paths diverged, nor how they’ve developed out of the characters I thought I knew. And yet, there’s a new way in which our lives still run parallel: we’ve entered the gaping, unstructured territory of our twenties, in which confused conversations about the future (and, coterminously, the past) are the one permanent object.

Am I one to shy away from a confrontational question? No, but I will defend my right to gawk at it like a fool while I think – which is why I’ve taken three paragraphs to get to my answer.

“‘Good at English’ and ‘bad at Maths’ gives you the target identity of Great Writer; if you’re not Great at what you’re good at, then who are you?”

“Do you think you’re an ambitious person?” My hesitation came first from a genuine attempt to discover my honest response. Tentatively, I told him, no, I didn’t think I was a very ambitious person anymore, that I’d been far more ambitious (read: uptight) when I was younger. That, with each year of growing into a deepening selfhood, I felt less of a reliance on markers to hinge my understanding of myself around. Markers that form a projected self when you’ve not had enough time experiencing the actual one and the world asks you to get it into some kind of recognised, worthwhile shape. ‘Good at English’ and ‘bad at Maths’ gives you the target identity of Great Writer; if you’re not Great at what you’re good at, then who are you?

My other reason for hesitation was to consider Theo’s definition of ‘ambition’. I asked him what success would look like. He was a little sheepish but nonetheless direct, firm, and honest in reply: a big name in the business world, even more impressive if that’s a name you make for yourself as a founder of a successful startup – oh, and trading is sexy. For the second time today, I was stunned. My friends and I share interests of a wholly different nature, and maybe we’re destined for unemployment– in any case, this was an answer I had never yet heard delivered with such open, frank enthusiasm.

It was the kind of goal I had simply never considered under the word ‘ambition’. I had always seen ambition as something that strove for greater, wider impact, particularly with what I saw as the more ‘human’ effects of the arts: write a great novel, craft a great film, release great music. Create something that is beautiful and great. What had put the first crack in my notion of ambition was catching myself out on the word ‘great’, and asking if I really cared to live beyond my short moment in time. This time, I caught myself on the word ‘create’. Theo’s ideal for ambition was centred, too, around creating something, wasn’t it? There is, I suppose, an essentially ‘human’ quality to an idea made real.

Our different stances brought us to consider who defines the measures of ‘ambition’ and ‘success’. I told him that, in my most naive and romantic moods, I cherish the idea of a life exploring the world’s wilder places in a campervan, or running a bookstore-and-bakery somewhere with friends. Could they only be called dreams, or could I call them ambitions, too? They are examples of retreating into a beautiful way of life, fuller in the experience of its own place and community, but with a narrower reach of influence; I would be happy cultivating my fragment of space in the world, but do I have a responsibility to lend myself to creating greater universal impact? Is ambition, after all, inextricable from those words, ‘great’ and ‘create’– and most importantly, is it something we must strive to keep alive in ourselves?

It was eleven o’clock, and the staff were asking us to leave. We said goodbye, with no notion of when we might next see each other, no intentions even of keeping in contact. In the blur of our lives in passing, we’d each felt a greater inclination to make ourselves clearer to the other. We left confused, uncertain, but feeling a warmth of honesty – or maybe that’s wasabi talking.