The Answer To 'What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?' | The Odyssey Online
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The Answer To 'What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?'

"Love The Questions Themselves"

Allegra Cook
Aug 10, 2015
University of North Carolina
18
The Answer To 'What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?'

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I just turned 20. It’s the beginning of a decade of career changes, relocations, dating mistakes, not-so-great starter jobs, late nights with best friends. It’s a decade of learning about ourselves and conceptualizing our experiences to understand what it is we truly want to do with our lives. So why is it that the thought of turning 20 is so scary?

Maybe it’s because we belong to a generation that is asked to know what we want to do with our lives at this age by our universities, our parents, and our friends. So often people our age mistake their college careers as a time to stick to a path that will lead to one job, instead of exploring.

I realized that turning 20 was scary because I allowed myself to be pressured by this mindset. Because when I didn’t have one answer to the question, “What do you want to do?”, I would let it scare me,when, in reality, discovering and exploring the passions and interests I have is a beautiful process.Trust in what happens to you. Trust that experiences make you grow, that hardships make you understand, that heartbreak is only leading you to the person you are supposed to be with. If we did not live these experiences, we would not truly understand the way that they are able to change us, the way that they show us more about ourselves. Travel because it leads you to answers that you didn’t know you wanted to ask.

Here’s what I do know: I love to travel, I love to write, I love to play the guitar. I believe in those passions. I used to worry that I did not know exactly what I wanted to do with my life, but now, I trust in that insecurity and recognize the small moments that give me a piece of the answer. And slowly, I am building the full thing.

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