Let’s push aside all pretenses for five minutes; we would all love to know what’s going to happen next in our lives. If someone knocked on our doors with an extremely detailed novel chronicling the next twenty years of our lives, we would grab that book so fast that we’d forget that an actual human being was just holding it. That novel would become our new best friend as we read each sentence again and again, committing it to memory. Even though not everything on those pages would be good, we’d be okay because we would know what to expect; we wouldn’t be blindsided.
Unfortunately, no such book exists. Navigating our futures is like stumbling around in a hay maze at midnight. Logically, we know what direction we have to head in, but realistically, we can’t see two feet in front of us. It’s way too easy to make a wrong turn and get lost.
Full disclosure: this kind of thinking used to send me into a full-scale panic attack. I would try to see what life could be like after graduation, and my heart would be racing and my thoughts would get so tangled up that there would be no point in trying to make sense of it all. Once I was able to calm down, I’d push away all thoughts of the future. I would focus on the now. It worked; the panic attacks stopped. The only problem is that it’s now time to think and plan for life after graduation. The “real world.” The rest of my life.
Terrifying, right? People are constantly growing and changing, discovering new things they like and discarding things they no longer care for. I could be a completely different person within the span of a few years. What if the person I become doesn’t like the career I try to build when I’m twenty-two years old? Our generation lives in a time where the future is quite literally ours. We have every opportunity in the world right in front of us. There are so many open doors- how are we supposed to know which one is the right one?
That’s why we all want to be able to look into a crystal ball and watch our futures play out like they were movies. We want to make absolutely certain that everything we’re working towards- the career, the relationship, the apartment- will turn out the way we want them to. That it will all be worth it. We need to know for sure that what we’re doing now pays off in the end.
Except, life doesn’t work like that. We don’t get the opportunity to see if a choice we make will benefit us or lead to our downfall. Every move we make comes with the risk that it won’t turn out in our favor. We may not get that job we’ve been working so hard for. The person we’ve fallen for may not feel the same way. So what? That doesn’t mean that we should stop trying and quit. If anything, that should motivate us to work harder.
Uncertainty, although scary, can actually be a good thing. It leaves us open to new people and experiences. If our lives were already planned out for us, life would be boring. There would be no surprises. While that might sound good because we wouldn’t be caught off-guard, it would turn us into robots. It would take so much more for us to feel anything, good or bad, because we’d be expecting everything that was coming our way. It’s hard to feel happy or sad when you know that something is supposed to happen. Uncertainty cracks our souls wide open and leaves us vulnerable to so many things. I’m not denying that it’s scary- being that exposed is one of my biggest fears- but I am saying that it’s worth it. Taking risks and jumping into the unknown is what makes life worth living. Playing it safe leads to a mediocre life at best.
Besides, it’s not the destination that’s important, it’s the journey that we take to get there that means everything.
