If you read my piece on teaching Shakespeare in high school, you know I have some bones to pick with it. However, I will play my own devil’s advocate here by discussing my favourite play, Hamlet, and confessing that I now wish I had been forced to read it in high school.

In my senior year, we read Macbeth: the lord who lost his head trying to get ahead, the Scottish Icarus whose wax wings dripped with blood as he flew closer to the sun. The year before, we read Julius Caesar, who, as the greatest magician in Rome, turned ambition into stab wounds… (spoiler alert).

For two years, we condemned ambition as the fatal flaw of these two great men. We studied each scene looking for symbols that would foreshadow their fall, chastising the way in which Macbeth and Caesar pushed forth insatiably, blind and deaf to the mounting consequences of their actions. “If only they had been less ambitious,” we would surmount, “they would have at least kept their lives.”

You can imagine my discontent when, five years later, in my final year of university, I read Hamlet and discovered his fatal flaw to be none other than inaction. By then, it was too late for me and my university experience. I had been cautioned against overarching ambition, and lazily let every extracurricular, many connections, and a lot of As and Bs slip by me; yet all these years later, I found myself blindsided by the consequences of inaction.

I’m not going to sit here and blame the tragedy of Macbeth for my lacklustre university experience—like everyone else my age, of course, I blame the pandemic. I do, however, feel slighted by the fact that my teachers doubled down on the threat of ambition while Hamlet, a far more pertinent cautionary tale for the youth, was there all along.

I wish I had been warned about this creeping illness of inaction, the madness caused by indecisiveness and an inability to do something difficult and uncomfortable. I was a teenager, so obviously I wouldn’t have listened anyway, but I wonder if I could have noticed the symptoms of inaction sooner if I had been forewarned.

Students, or young people in general, hear a lot about making the “right” decisions, about avoiding bad choices. That’s all fine and good, but how can we communicate effectively that the things they take risks on are just as important as the things they do to give them security?

I have been thinking about the dichotomy of inaction and ambition as a dichotomy of the past and the future: maybe inaction won’t make your future implode on itself, but when you get to that future and look back on your past, will you be devastated by what you see? All the things you didn’t do, all of the opportunities you let pass you by, they populate your past with blank spaces so that when you look back, the garden of things you did somehow looks sparse and fruitless.

And we are conflicted, because we also have to remember that Caesar tried to do too much and all of his friends stabbed him? Despite the tone of this piece, which seems to have quickly turned bleak, I am truly optimistic that there is a generous line that we can walk, where we can get all the satisfaction of action and none of the burnout of ambition.

At the risk of crossing too many literary streams, I also discovered Sylvia Plath’s “fig tree” metaphor far too late in my academic career. She writes:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose… and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

We can’t do everything, so we certainly can’t do everything the right way, either. But you must, you must, do something. You must take advantage of what there is; “fill your boots” as my mom says when we’re at a continental breakfast or an all-you-can-eat buffet. The question for young people becomes: would you rather have too much on your plate, or starve?

The lady doth deal too frequently in extremes! There has to be a middle-ground somewhere between Caesar and Hamlet; something between dying for doing too much and dying for doing nothing. Well, I guess the dying part is non-negotiable, so the middle-ground must be a constant state of doing something and delaying death as long as possible.

It’s not a very upbeat pep talk, but it is quite literally a “call to action.” Maybe the action you take is imperfect and uncomfortable, and maybe it doesn’t have any inherent value to anyone but yourself. But you did it! Instead of a barren trail behind you, your path is littered with half-eaten figs, because there aren’t any rules about eating them in their entirety, and you can always take things off your plate and sneak them to the dog or something.

The tragedy of Hamlet gave me so much perspective on inaction, even though I am not the prince of Denmark nor do I have to kill my uncle. It’s working its way from “big picture” problems to how I live my everyday life. When I am doing nothing, I look at my overflowing laundry hamper, the unfinished article on my desk, text messages that I haven’t gotten back to yet and the beautiful day it is outside, and I think “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

And it makes me do something. And doing something always helps.

Everybody wishes that they had done more, as soon as “now” becomes “back then.” It’s so hard to conceptualize, because as much as I can’t be in two places at once, I know that I am out there somewhere in the future, looking backwards. What do you think they see? I want to make it something.