Why not knowing the future isn’t a bad thing
Dearest Cobbers, especially my seniors. I would like to chat this week about the end. If any of you know me at all, which if you’re reading this you probably do, you know that my personality isn’t exactly average. My whole life I have been the weird one in the family, class, room, building, what have you, but I revel in it. Now that I’m graduating college, it isn’t exactly helping me in life. People are asking me with increasing intensity about my dreams, goals and life-choices. Let me tell you, being a person who usually answers to no one, I am having a hard time ignoring everyone.
I don’t have an internship lined up, I don’t have several business-type buzzword worthy interviews to dress for and I’m not going to grad school (for now), and I am ok with it. I know I can’t be the only one who has absolutely zero idea what I want to do after graduation, so I get a little more than frustrated when people stare at me like I shot their TV when I respond casually to their prods with a blank, “I don’t know.”
Maybe I am a spiteful person, but my response is usually a heartfelt, “I don’t know about me, but what do you want to do?” And, when I am asking adults that are my parents’ age what they want to “do,” I get strange results. A couple of people were offended, which isn’t a surprising response, what with their old-timeyness and bad, old people attitudes, but I have heard some really great answers.
A woman that is quite a bit older was a spitfire, and she told me I was clever and that she had no idea what was coming her way when she got older. She is currently travelling the United States as a Norwegian folk-singer and has been a pizza-maker, mom and a flight attendant. She joined the “Air-crew” as she called it after dropping out of college her sophomore year and never looked back. She said she met some of the most interesting people on planes, but the ones that really struck her were the ones who looked like, “they had the life sucked out of’em,” she said.
She went on about how when she was young many people joined businesses and travelled for work but had no desire. She lived in a time when art was a luxury, bohemia was a dream and you did what was normal to stay afloat. “It was hard if you didn’t want what others wanted, you were waiting, a lot,” she said, and let me tell you, it made me feel better.
That may seem like an opposite reaction, hearing that things are weird, hard and annoying doesn’t exactly send me into a frenzy, but I have to say, knowing other people recognize this sense of confusion is helpful. I don’t have to follow this weird path everyone seems wildly bent on clinging to. No one is holding my hand anymore, and I actually can wait. I can breathe cleanly and not feel rushed off to some other big part of my life for me to ‘finish.’ Waiting, to me, is appealing because up until now I have been ushered, ever so conveniently, to where I am now.
Now, all of this sounds like complaining, and on some level it is; I have to say though, I think I am right where I want to be. There are so many possibilities, and it took me, an old woman, a chance encounter and 21 years to see it.
