For most college students, there is a great deal of unknown when it comes to the rest of their lives. A lucky few know exactly what they love, have known exactly what they’ve wanted to do with their lives, and pursue it with admirable passion. Others, however, are essentially clueless and paralyzed by indecision. It’s not surprising either, the possibilities are endless.
Hundreds of years ago, essentially nobody had the ability to choose from so many different fields. Options were limited to family businesses, farming, or becoming an apprentice for some willing craftsman.An average villager couldn’t just up and decide they had a passion for dentistry and go for it. Only the truly privileged had the wealth to pursue their educational passion.
Fast forward back to the present and the course catalog at BC alone is intimidating for an individual trying to decide what to do. Understandably, this causes a lot of agony for those who don’t really know what their future should be.
There’s a lot of talk about the messages the media delivers to the public, from body image to cultural stereotypes. One message not covered in this discussion is the concept of an ideal way to live one’s life. There are hundreds of people who found their one true calling and now live in a state of near-constant bliss because they found a way to get paid buckets of dollars for doing what they love and would do for free anyway.
Another variation is the story of someone who spent – or wasted – years and years of their life in a thankless grind of a job with a boss they hate, doing completely unfulfilling work for incredibly low wages. After some epiphany, the worker quits, works on their passion and yet again, finds their one true calling in life.
Stories of this type all have the same problem. Why does one need to have a singular purpose or passion, that one single thing that completes their existence? Who decided that people can’t do more than one thing with their life? It’s truly absurd.
In this age of eco-consciousness there’s constantly talk of renewable and unrenewable resources. What’s never mentioned is the one truly unrenewable resource – time. Often ,people waste too much time trying to make a decision, trying to blindly guess what course in life is the right one, to be one of those success stories found on feel-good clickbait.
Stop trying to figure it out and go for something, anything. If it scares you, even better, you’ll grow more from it. Do everything that sounds interesting. Who cares if the decision isn’t necessarily the right one? It was made, an adventure was had, lessons were learned, growth was experienced. Life was lived.
Medical science is impressive these days. The average college kid has, at a rough estimate, 50-70 more years of life ahead of them. That’s more than enough to do almost everything, to explore more possibilities in ways that people from the past could not have conceived of.
People often spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make a big decision. What is often overlooked is the small decisions often have more of a lasting impact on one’s life than the big decisions. Where it might be easy to consider the life-changing consequences of deciding to major in English or Engineering, little thought is given where to eat lunch on a given day, or what show to go to some Friday night.
It’s been said that the hardest part of doing anything is thinking about doing it. Life is about living, about doing things and going places, not sitting and staring at a wall, trying to guess what the future will bring.
Be adventurous, and like Nike says – just do it.