Professor Dan Schnur lecturing CLA Interns on messaging and voter behavior.
Life is unpredictable. That’s what makes it scary.
You can plan out everything, account for dozens of different factors, think five, ten, twenty steps ahead, and just when you start to feel comfortable, like maybe you have a handle on this whole “growing up” thing, the Universe will come along and humble you with a great, big Ha, psyche! at the most inconvenient moment.
It’s happened to me before, just this past year, actually, in my second month as a freshman in college. I joined a handful of extracurriculars I believed would interest me, settled into a nice routine that I followed day in and day out, and then I made the mistake of thinking that I had everything figured out, that life had gotten just the slightest bit predictable. Soon after, I ended up badly spraining my ankle during Taekwondo and all of a sudden, I had to restructure my life around healing from my injury. I had to go home and miss a lot of my classes. I had to cancel plans I’d made with friends weeks in advance. I even had to quit martial arts after a whopping 5 weeks of doing it when, initially, I’d intended to see it through to the very end of my college career.
I know it doesn’t seem like much, but for someone who thrives in structured environments, who feels anxious when she’s even a little bit behind schedule, who’s usually crippled with indecision when her plans spiral out of control, it felt like the world was ending. High school was a turbulent time for me, a time of stress and worry because I thought I needed to figure out my whole life in those four years. And college was supposed to be a time of stability, of steady sureness in my path. For once, I just wanted to feel like I knew what I was doing with my life. But the Universe seemed to not want to give that to me.
Through CAUSE, however, and especially through the conversations we had with Professor Dan Schnur on Friday, July 7, I’ve learned that’s an impossible goal, that it’s unreasonable to believe that your life will ever follow some sort of pre-set path. More than that, I’ve learned that you shouldn’t want that level of predictableness and rigidity in the first place, that it’s much more restricting than it is reassuring.
I remember that realization hit me harder than any of the others.
Because, for so much of my life, I envied those kinds of people who knew exactly what they were going to do, exactly where they wanted to go. I envied them for their drive and sense of direction, for their conviction and their certainty in the path they’d chosen. I wished more than anything that I could be like that, that I could be absolutely sure that I knew where I was going.
But now, after that conversation, I have a greater appreciation for the ambiguity of my career path. I want to pursue public interest law. I want to learn how our government and institutions work so that I can use the law to uplift those who have been so often oppressed by it. But no, I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do that or exactly where I’ll end up, but I still have that general idea, I have that area of interest, and that’s enough. It’s enough because it’s a starting point, a place where I can begin, where I can launch myself into the world and continue to grow from there. Within that ambiguity, I’ve found opportunity, a vast expanse of possibility where I can do anything, become anyone. My path is not fixed, and that means that it’s flexible. That means it gives me room to change, to adapt, to evolve my vision of the future into what I truly want it to be. Because people, like paths, are not fixed. We change, we adapt, we evolve and our desires, hopes, and dreams evolve with us. What I love and want to pursue now may not be exactly what I want to do in the future. So not being 100% certain of my path is an advantage because it gives me a margin of error that I can use to make a course correction if necessary.
So yes, life is unpredictable. And yes, that’s what makes it scary. But that’s also what makes it worth living.
The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of CAUSE or the CAUSE network.
Written by Meghna Nair, Leadership Academy 2023 Intern.
The CAUSE Leadership Academy (CLA) for students is a nine-week, paid, internship program that prepares college undergraduates to lead and advocate for the Asian Pacific Islander community on their campuses and beyond.