Sorry for messing with the clich‚, but surprises can really fill up your life. There are just so many of them. Good surprises-winning lotto tickets, secret admirers and toasty days in mid-December-and bad surprises-parking tickets, stalkers and bugs in your salad. These jolts of joy and horror are what keep us on our toes. In fact, they keep us tiptoeing through life, hoping to step up, trying to avoid stepping right in it. And sometimes you surprise yourself, and these can be the biggest, scariest shockers of them all. Like, hey, your life is not filling up with surprises the way you expected.
Coming to college I was pretty damn certain I had the next 10, 20, 30 years of my life all mapped out. Or at least I had a rough sketch. I was all set to be a tropical field biologist, trekking through the Amazon and sleeping in a canvas tent. I would be married to some like-minded guy-someone more than willing to accommodate all my exotic plans and share my bug-ridden tent. My days would be filled with careful observation, methodical note taking and midday leopard wrestling. Well, surprise! My career map needs to be re-googled.
I guess that’s what a little education will do to you: strip you down, crush your plans and leave you wondering whether to rebuild. Maybe, or definitely or at least probably, I’m not going to be a tropical field biologist. I don’t think I’m cut from the right stock. First of all, I’m a chick with a severe mosquito allergy. I’m also a suburban girl who likes her creature comforts. And I’m a social person who needs more than lizards for company. Not looking good for a life in the tropics.
I spent the entire summer sorting grass and counting seeds in an ecology lab. Go ahead, you try it. I’ll spoil the surprise and tell you that you will end up questioning whether you have the focus and the patience to follow much of anything to its rightful end. Maybe those virtues come with more experience (or better projects). But, surprise! I discovered I was not totally off base. I have not lost the interest or passion or curiosity that led me to pursue the scientist’s life. I just may have to channel my energies in some new and possibly more realistic ways.
So here I am, halfway through college and shocked to find myself stumbling over old ideas like, the more you learn, the less you know. And the more you understand the world around you, the harder it can be to decide your place in it. Or not. The surprises just keep on coming. As for me, I’ll keep looking for my tent boy.
Tess is a junior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].