Life: it’s not on a calendar

I spent the majority of high school planning. I had a plan for which classes I would take each year and the years following, and I anticipated all the grades I would receive. I knew which neighbors I wanted to carpool with each semester. I planned on becoming editor of the newspaper and starting varsity defender for the girls’ soccer team and a national merit scholar. I packed my lunch every night and laid my uniform out for the morning. I wanted to graduate unscathed, admired, fierce and widely known as brilliant. I was sure I had it all figured out.

Life, however, doesn’t care much about your plans. I didn’t get a 4.0. I failed to get the best parking spot. I had my heart broken and the soccer team didn’t have a very successful season. I was denied acceptance to a great deal of academic institutions. I skipped the last day of senior year for a funeral. I forgot my lunch at home at least twenty times and stained a great deal of my oxfords with some combination of coffee, makeup, toothpaste, ink, and peanut butter.

I like to think that I learned a great deal that final year in the comfortable bubble of high school. Nominally, I learned we couldn’t account for all the confounding variables in this messy experiment known as being human. But like any respectable scientist or type A personality, I can’t stop making plans and exercising control. It’s as though this time around, I no longer think that any factor is undetermined. There is comfort in falsely believing that the universe somehow took into account my schedule before the course of human history was charted.

Being the beautiful microcosm of real life that it is, college cannot be planned to perfection. Studying, becoming involved, and obtaining adequate amounts of sleep will certainly make a difference in ones success, but they won’t ensure that you graduate in four years or that you become a highly paid employee of a respectable company. You could still fail a test or that company could go under. A bus could hit you.

On the other hand, you could also fall in love. You could go abroad and become fluent in another language. You could find a cure to cancer. You could discover a passion for food photography or underwater basket weaving or eco friendly apparel design. You could decide college isn’t your thing and become the CEO of a wildly successful startup.

Coming to UD was a snap decision for me. I didn’t plan on coming here, not even a little bit. I have strayed far from the path I envisioned for myself as a kid. Those unscheduled moments, however, have been the most incredible, because until you find yourself without a map or a calendar or a nagging voice in your ear, who you really are has yet to be determined. Life is a great deal of crap and a great deal of beauty. The mystery of which will strike next is what gets each and every one of us out of bed in the morning, and the only thing we can plan, confront, or determine is which factor of life we let hit us harder.