“What do you want to do when you graduate?” This is a question that I’ve been hammered with since my first day of college. I was expected to have my career path chosen by the time I was a freshman in high school. I took a personality test, answered a few questions, and boom, I was on my way to the rest of my life. See, it’s become the norm: we’ve been programmed to get an education to find a career that makes the most money possible. Because let’s face it, a dream is great but it doesn’t pay the bills. We need the money to get the title, the “things”, the life we think we’ve always wanted. Because if you don’t have a plan, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re left behind. But what if that was the answer? What if being left behind was just what you needed to get ahead?
I’ve learned that life isn’t as black and white as everyone makes it out to be. It isn’t the known and unknown, pass or fail or even employed or unemployed. It’s about finding passion in the pursuit of the unattainable. We must learn to flirt with the line that crosses between giving up and seeing how much more we can take. We must learn that taking risks and being open to whatever comes next allows us to not just exist, but to truly live. It becomes about creating moments, not waiting for them to happen and realizing that not knowing gives us liberation beyond anything we have ever experienced before.
We are free to discover, feel and think on our own terms and to set our own standards for what gives our life meaning and purpose. Gilda Radner put it simply, “Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change and making the best of every moment without knowing what’s going to happen next: it is a lifetime of delicious ambiguity.” So go live life to the fullest and without a single regret. Because you only get one life, make sure you live every moment of it on your terms.
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