I turned 26 today. A lot of people talk about how fun your 20s are. Few people talk about how strange they are. I can’t speak to my late 20s yet, but I am finding my mid-20s to be particularly peculiar.

I used to wish that the first 26 years of my life would have better prepared me to confront times like these. Part of me still does. But if there is one thing that I actually have learned, it’s that wishing for things to be different is a waste of time.

So here I am, armed with (largely) useless knowledge of trigonometry, calculus, and chemistry, trying to figure out how the world works and understand my place in it.

To many people, I probably look like an adult. But in case it isn’t already clear, I don’t feel like one. I frankly don’t even know what “feeling like an adult” would entail. The mere notion sounds callow to me now as I write this, having swallowed a few bittersweet sips of my mid-twenties.

I used to romanticize the idea of being (and conceivably feeling like) an adult. I associated adulthood with having things figured out. I have since met enough adults to know that on average (and on above average), that is very much not the case (no offense, adults).

“Having it all figured out” is actually starting to sound less appealing to me, which sort of feels like progress. If I had to guess, the process of “figuring it out” is most of the fun.

I often try to compare it to hiking. If hiking were just about standing on the mountain top, more mountains would have ski lifts. Much of the joy of gazing down over the valley once you’ve reached the top is knowing that you trudged across all of that terrain to get there. And while some mountains do indeed have ski lifts, and some people do indeed opt to take them instead of hiking, when you’re at the peak, it’s usually the sweaty, exhausted folks who are smiling the widest and laughing about some shenanigans that took place on the way up.

I imagine that one day I’ll miss the potential inherent to uncertainty. I imagine that one day I will miss being so close to the bottom of the mountain.

Today, however, is not that day.

The last year has been an act in trying to embrace the dynamism and impermanence of life. That is admittedly a lot easier said than done. But as it goes, well done is better than well said.

So here I am, having officially completed my second Bar-Mitzvah-worth of life, without much to show for it. Here I am, trying to say less and “do” more (not to be confused with “do more”). Because, at the end of the day, that’s all we really are. Not what we say. Not what we think. Not what we feel. Not what we want. Not what we fear. We are what we do.

I spent much of the last year arriving at this conclusion. It is neither original nor profound, but it’s true (…I think).

I hesitate to even call it a conclusion. It’s more of a premise. A premise to a very important question. Maybe even the most important question that I (or anyone else for that matter) will ever answer. And as the saying goes, if you don’t ask yourself big questions, you will live a small life.

So my big question is this: if who I am is an accumulation of what I do, then what should I do?

As often is the case with matters of the heart and soul, the answer is not so obvious. To explain how truly not obvious the answer is, I’ll have to take a quick detour down David Attenborough Lane.

I was watching an episode of Our Planet II the other week, and while I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I envied the polar bears, lions, albatrosses, or gray whales, I will say that there was something remarkably simple about their existence. From what I could gather, every animal had one singular goal: to live long enough to pass on their genes. And to do that, they had two sub-goals: to eat and to not get eaten.

Again, not the most glamorous existence, but a damn simple one.

Simple because their menu of options is so limited. When they’re hungry, it’s very clear what they should do—eat. When another animal is trying to eat them, it’s also very clear what they should do—run (or swim) as fast as they can in the opposite direction.

We humans admittedly have much “higher-class” problems to contend with. But they are also a hell of a lot less simple.