The Formula for Life

No one says there is a formula to life. And yet, young people are inundated with very formulaic advice:
Go to college so you can get a good job. Do what you love. Follow your dreams. If you work hard, you can be anything you want to be. etc. etc. As if these mantras are the key(s) to success and happiness in life.

The end of my college career has brought with it the ambiguity and uncertainty of the unknown future, which is even more magnified by the constant and ever-pressing question of, "What's next?" Everyone wants to know! (Even complete strangers who find out I've recently graduated.) But what a lot of people don't realize is that their well-meaning small talk can put a lot of undue pressure on students who don't know what they want to do yet.

Lately, I've been so frustrated thinking about post-grad life and wrestling to answer this question, "what's next."There are so many possibilities, but a lifetime would never be enough time to taste them all. Should I pursue this? Or that? At what point should I choose skill (what I"m good at) over passion (what I love)? Is it okay to sacrifice some dreams? And if so, which ones? What kinds of dreams should be nonnegotiable? How do I know that my decisions now won't have a negative impact on my future?

I've noticed that there are a lot of invisible standards to live up to. Asking a graduate "What's next?", however well-intentioned, demands that he or she actually know what's next or have a goal or a career or a dream job that they're aiming for.

But it's hard to say, I don't know. 

It's hard to admit that just because you have a degree doesn't mean you have your life together (or even decently planned out). It's hard to tell people your tentative plans knowing they might sound unambitious. Why? Because everyone ëxpects great things"from me. And I don't know if they're being vague on purpose or if it's just the "right"thing to say. What great things do you expect? Yeah, it sounds encouraging in the golden, romantic glow of graduation, but afterward? Life is not so forgiving or easy to navigate as academia.

The formula is easy: grow up, go to college, work hard, get married, save money for retirement, start a family, keep working hard and you can relax in your old age happy and satisfied (and surrounded by loving grandchildren if you're lucky). But life is not math, my friends. It's messy. It's unpredictable. As I've been learning lately, it does not go according to plan. As a highly-organized self-proclaimed planner, that's hard for me. I want the security of having my life carefully mapped out, but Life does not like to be pinned down so easily. And you know what? I'm learning (slowly but surely) to be okay with that, whether it's 16 love letters left behind, or rescheduling the same coffee date 4 times, or simply trusting God with my career path.

Besides, I was never that good at math anyway.