In the jungle of my post-grad life, I can't tell you how many times I have heard the advice, "find the thing you really love in life and pursue it." But what happens when you haven't figured that out yet? What if you like a handful of things equally? What if, in the rigid structure of higher education, you dabbled in the one thing you truly loved but was unable to dig into it because your course schedule had other plans for you?
This post isn't an attempt to help you figure out the thing you love most in life or provide steps to attain it once you have figured it out. This post is simply a reality checkpoint. Checkpoints have always been helpful metaphors for me because I truly view life as a journey that is uncharted. Maybe the checkpoints appear as you go and are specific to each of us. This reality checkpoint, for me, comes at the top of a long, steep hill that has been covered in pride and doubt, and in question and misdirection. Since February - three months before graduation - I have been asking myself honest questions about what I want to do with my future and what career I would be most happy in. I have googled many advice pieces regarding those very questions and tried to give myself honest answers.
And the answer that I keep coming back to is that I have no one answer. Nothing I have read has helped me whittle down my passions until I found the one I should ultimately follow. I have asked many friends the same questions and spoken with others, even ones who have had a clearer picture of their career in their heads, about what their plans are. The truth of the matter is that most of us don't know exactly what we want in a career. Like myself, most of us have goals and passions in life that drive us to pursue certain things and that help paint a picture of our futures. However, many of us haven't figured out what career we would be most happy with or even a good place to start to figure that out.
I've thought about long and hard about this next conclusion, that I decided to share it. I think part of the problem is that my generation has been socialized, not only by teachers, professors and society at large, but also by our parents. This socialization has taught us that a college education is the answer; the answer to economic problems and the answer to a happy life. So, we do it. We go to college. We go, most of us not knowing what the future holds or what we want our future to hold, and hope and bet that college will help us figure that out. The problem with that is that while college can definitely show us paths we want or don't want, it might not. The problem is that college might not, in the end, provide for us the answer to the question, "what is your life's calling?"
While I do not regret my choice in college or many of the choices I made while in college, I think we as a society rely on it too heavily to give structure to our economy and our lives. Instead of it being the beginning of our lives as many think and hope, I believe it is only part of the puzzle. It's not the legend on the map, it's simply a location on the map. In this fragile and trying time since graduation, I have learned that figuring out what we want in life is a continual process that started when we were very young and doesn't end when we finish education. I've learned that it's okay to not have a clear picture of a career path, but finding that path can be very tricky and exhausting.
But in that tricky and exhausting period of figuring it all out, it is important to cling to the things that you do know make you feel happy, full and alive. There we all have things, people or activities in life that we are sure of and they become pillars for us in times of worry. As long as they aren't to our detriment, they can become the guardrails on our path. Building our lives around those distinct, dependable happy reminders is, I think, what it's all about. These pillars of ours can be as small as reading our favorite novel or as important as our family, but they always bring us back to our real selves. They are the closest things, I have found, to answering that big question in life; closer than a college class ever can be.
And that is why I choose cake. I am choosing to bake a cake today, not because today was #NationalDessertDay (every day should be National Dessert Day), but because cake reminds me of the happiest times in life, of my passion for baking and always gives me a reason to smile.
