I feel as if I am constantly bombarded by my peers' explanations of their five-year plans. Everyone and their mother seem to have life laid out as far as a decade in their color-coordinated and highlighted planners. Now, don't get me wrong I love a nicely organized planner. My planner is just quite a stretch from those I just mentioned. I never have more than a week in front of me planned, and I have no idea what I want to do with my year, much less my entire life.
As a sophomore in college, it feels like the end of my "major-change" period. I'm pretty much reaching the point where I should know what I want to pursue, and begin to work towards that goal. But let me tell you it's okay to not follow the mold. To not have your entire future planned out by the time you're eighteen, nineteen or twenty. It's so hard to know what the real world is truly like outside of college. Even though everyone says graduating high school and moving on to college is graduating into the "real world" as well, college is still a bubble. We're still surrounded by a large group of students around our age, and most of us are focused primarily on class and what's happening around school. We aren't fully released into the big, bad world until after we graduate from our universities.
The real world is daunting and full of challenges, but I want to remind you that we shouldn't rush life. Life comes at us fast, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. And if your own ride is a little behind the rest of the crowd, that's okay. We shouldn't have to feel rushed to know what we want to do for the rest of our lives. That is an enormous task and one that I am still tackling daily. I don't have a plan, I don't know what I want to do with my life. But I do know that I want to enjoy where I'm at while I'm there, share all that I have with my very best friends and family, and live my life to the absolute fullest. Right now, my five-year plan doesn't revolve around which med-school I want to attend or what graduate student program I hope to be accepted into. Instead, my plan is to say "yes" to the opportunities presented to me and to embrace the roller coaster of life.
