Title: An Alternate Route

This past Sunday, a few friends and I took a practice LSAT test Kaplan was offering at the Law School. For those of you unfamiliar with the LSAT: first of all, thank your lucky stars. It was hard. Second, a description: Kaplan’s practice booklet says it is “unlike any other test you’ve taken in your academic career,” because it is “skills-based”: “it doesn’t ask you to repeat memorized facts or to apply learned formulas to specific problems.” All you have to do is “think.” That, my friends, is easier said than done.

Life is so much easier when options are laid out in black and white, with a clear distinction between the correct and incorrect choices. Life, however, has rarely presented me with two choices, one of which was clearly wrong and the other clearly right. Choosing a major? Signing up for classes? Applying for internships? None of these are simple, clear-cut decisions. At least they weren’t for me, and they haven’t been for my friends. More often than not, life presents my choices in (14) shades of gray.

I wish someone could have told me what major to pick, done the thinking, made the hard decisions for me. And I’m not sure this making-hard-decisions thing is ever going to end: Now, after I’ve finally settled into my major, I have to start thinking about taking the LSAT and looking at grad schools. Sometimes, I look around at other people’s lives and wonder how on earth they all seem to know what they’re doing. I think I missed out on some sort of “Handbook for Making Life Decisions.” (Did they pass those out at orientation? I probably shouldn’t have skipped all those lectures that weekend.)

I wonder, though, if anyone, really, has life figured out, or if we’re all walking around fooling each other. Maybe some of you do. If you do, I’m jealous. I certainly don’t, and recently I’ve had conversations with friends whom I consider driven, who seem to “have it all together,” yet are questioning their “life decisions” and second-guessing themselves.

Is this unnatural? Is there an outline to which my life should be conforming, like in the board game “Life”? Or is the uncertainty, the doubt, my friends and I experience simply part of growing up? A part of living? Is life something we can figure out?

I’ve slowly reached the conclusion that sometimes life just happens. I can’t, try though I might, control everything. Over and over again, whenever I’ve mapped out some sort of plan, life (or God, depending on your worldview) has thrown me a curveball. This sucks. (Especially since I can’t catch.) It’s disturbing to learn (or in my case, continually relearn) that I do not have as much control over my own life as I wish I did.

I was on a shuttle once in Boston heading from the airport to the subway station. I was bored, so I started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. He was cute and looked young, but it turned out he was a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He explained, with extreme humility, that getting that position had been a “series of fluke events.”

The man was without a doubt a zillion times smarter than me and had every right to brag a bit, but he lived out something I’ve been learning lately: that who you are is more important than what you do. That how you handle a decision-making process (choosing a major, applying to grad schools) and how you respond to events in your life is more important than what the events or decisions actually are. It’s not that deciding on a career is unimportant: I know I need to use my talents to the best of my ability and be able to support myself in some way. But I tend to focus on “success” as if it’s some goal in and of itself, rather than an indicator that I am making the most of my potential. My priorities are often misplaced, and I give in to stress and anxiety because I forget that there are more important things than whether or not I have a perfect schedule next semester or an A in that class. Who I am informs the decisions I make and how I live my life; it shouldn’t be (though for me it often is) the other way around.

I think growing up means that when we face decisions in which there is no clear-cut, right-or-wrong answer, we do our best, with grace and dignity, to make the choice that seems most appropriate to us. I hope that’s going a lot better for you than it is for me…

Good luck to the football team Saturday. See y’all next week!

— Leigh Dickey is a junior in global studies. She can be reached at [email protected].