When I was at work the other day, I encountered a couple who has known my family since before I was born.  Because I hadn’t seen them in awhile, they asked me about my education and some other general catch-up questions.   They had remembered that when I was younger my biggest aspiration was to become a teacher– definitely teaching English, probably at the elementary level.

I told the couple that no, I hadn’t ended up pursuing a career in teaching for a couple reasons, but primarily because I feared that I wouldn’t be able to get a job once I graduated.  At that point it seemed like everybody I knew wanted to be a teacher and I feared getting lost in a sea of bodies trying to do the same thing.

…If you’ve just joined me, I’ll let you sit down and enjoy the glass of irony I’ve just placed in front of you…while I sit and apply for jobs, hoping not to get lost in a sea of bodies looking to attain the same.  In all seriousness though, by the time I was enrolling in college courses, I was no longer seriously considering a career in teaching, but I guess switching to major in English with a minor in Creative Writing didn’t guarantee me employment after four (very) short years of schooling.

I don’t regret in any way the manner in which I handled my college career.  I’m happy with and proud of what I studied, what I thought, and what I’ve written.  But when I saw that couple, I had to laugh at the precautions I thought I had to take to make sure I got a job after graduating, only to be in the very position I had stressed over.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can’t really plan every moment of life in hopes of a precisely cultivated outcome because it just doesn’t work that way.  You’ve got to learn to be happy when things go your way, and okay when they don’t.

While it’s comforting to think that you’ve got a plan and you’ve got everything all figured out, sometimes you need that one thing to shake you out of a comfort zone you’ve been in for so long in order to really reevaluate where you stand at present day, because we aren’t always guaranteed the things we think we can count on, and we’ve got to know how to react and adjust accordingly.

bridget