A Path Amorphous – Blog Post

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Do you ever look at where you are in life and compare it to where you thought you would be ten years ago? Five years? Even one year or less?

I’ve been reflecting lately on how much my life has changed in ten years, and sometimes I don’t understand how I got to where I am. I’m very happy, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not complaining. But where I am versus where I planned to be are two very different things. Surely someone else feels the same, right? I hope I’m not alone. I have known people before whose lives have followed their plan, but I have not experienced that and don’t think I ever will.

Some people believe in fate, others believe solely in free will, and yet others believe some combination of the two. I fall into the latter camp, probably partly because of how much my life has changed. I don’t think all of life is totally up to chance, we as humans do have to make decisions and those decisions can have huge impacts. But we can’t predict everything that will happen, and sometimes we’re surprised. We meet someone, we start a new job or course of study, we move. These things can have a larger impact than we anticipated, and can lead us down a new path entirely.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in my life has been my husband. Marriage was not very high on my priority list for most of my life, and I was initially planning to get established in a career before considering marriage. When I transferred universities and moved back to Georgia, I decided I wanted to date a little bit over the summer. I wasn’t looking for anything serious, though perhaps I should have known myself better and realized that I am incapable of doing anything casually. I reached out to someone I was interested in, and the more I got to know him the more I fell absolutely head over heels in love. I knew within two weeks of meeting my husband that I was going to marry him if at all possible. His balance of interests and shared values were more than I expected to find in someone, and even though it went against my plan I was not going to let him go. Getting married has had a huge impact on my life, and definitely for the better.

At many points in my life, I’ve had the opportunity to make a life-altering decision. There is no way to understand all the impacts just one decision could have, and I do sometimes wonder how my life would have gone had I made a different decision. The universities and career I chose could have resulted in an entirely different path. The biggest decision I’ve made is my general pursuit of stability instead of a creative career. I enjoy and do well in my business career, but there is a wonder in the back of my mind as to what would have happened if I had pursued a writing career from the beginning. What if I had realized earlier that it would be impossible for me to not write? I try sometimes, to not write and to focus solely on my professional career, but then I get an idea or a line or a few words stuck in my head and I feel I will go insane if I don’t write it down. Thankfully, I’ve heard many stories of writers who have other careers, too. I know it’s possible to do both, with enough discipline and drive.

So if life is a combination of fate and our decisions, how do we plan anything? As I said in the poem at the top of this page, we can really only plan with the understanding that our plans may change. Whether by an outside force or our own decision to do something different, flexibility is required in life. You can’t stand, unbending, against what life brings. Trying to do so will lead to a break. We make the best decisions we can, but don’t hold anything too tightly.

There are people, I’ve seen, who have a plan for their lives and have mostly followed it. They know what they want to do when they become an adult, and that’s what happens for them. Honestly, I don’t and probably will never understand how that feels. Again, I do believe fate, combined with human will, is what guides our lives. I guess some of us are more in sync with fate than others, and that, in and of itself, is another aspect of fate outside our control.

I hope, as I grow older, I remember to stay flexible, like a tree in the breeze. Making the best decisions I can, but understanding that there’s only so much I can control. There is a time for decision-making, and there is a time to adapt and change my plans.

I am really interested to see where the next ten years takes me, especially considering all the change I’ve experienced in the last ten years. As much as I would like to know what will happen ahead of time, I would rather not know the future and experience it all as it happens. I think life is more interesting that way, and it leaves something to dream of and be excited by.