A walk & a realization

I was taking a walk the other day planning for my next decade and half stint of my life. Wanting to slow down from the busy corp world but what exactly would I do after I quit? I am so accustomed to the job idea most of our societies constantly linger on that I completely forgot how recent this luxury really is.

Forget how long ago the suffrage movement was – even my mom’s generation didn’t plan well for their retirement. Of course they made the most of what they could, but here I am with all these opportunities and I feel like I’m wasting it away chasing a chicken! How did I get so lucky? It’s crazy how this thought doesn’t occur to me as often as it should. Are we living lives that don’t practice gratitude like how often we follow our ego?
The ability to even contemplate “what’s next” in my career, to have choices about how I want to spend the next fifteen years, to build wealth for retirement – these weren’t options for women just one or two generations back. The suffragettes and early women’s rights fighters endured imprisonment, force-feeding, public humiliation, and social ostracism just so we could have the right to vote, to get an education, to pursue careers. They literally put their bodies on the line so that I could walk into any university, build a career, contribute to a 401K, and have some control over how I want to shape my life.

But here’s what really hit me during that walk: how are we actually using this hard-won freedom? Are we honoring their sacrifice with how we spend our days? Or are we squandering it scrolling mindlessly through social media, getting lost in manufactured outrage, or hiding behind the convenient lie of “self-care” when what we’re really doing is avoiding the harder work of actually building meaningful lives? I’m not saying rest isn’t important, but I wonder if Susan B. Anthony would look at us spending hours on TikTok or Instagram and think, “This is what we fought for?”

These women couldn’t have imagined the specific freedoms we enjoy today – the luxury of career anxiety, the privilege of planning retirement, the ability to walk alone and contemplate our futures – but they fought with this unwavering belief that future generations of women deserved better, deserved more. They saw potential in us that we sometimes don’t even see in ourselves.
It makes me wonder: are we living up to their vision? Are we using our freedom to create, to contribute, to push boundaries further for the women who come after us? Or are we getting comfortable in the freedoms they won and forgetting that freedom is something you have to actively use, not just passively enjoy? Maybe the real way to honor them is to ask ourselves daily: am I making the most of what they died for? Am I practicing the kind of gratitude that transforms how I live, not just how I feel?