Most people don't believe me when I tell them that the most life changing class I've taken in college has been creative writing. It has nothing to do with my major or minors, but it taught me an incredibly important lesson about life, something I doubt our professor even intended. The professor was a grad student named Serena who I'm fairly sure resented having to teach undergraduate classes as she constantly reminded us that one could not be taught how to be a good writer.
Instead she focused what little classroom structure we had on teaching us how to be creative, a process which usually consisted of "games" where we came up with random words and had to combine them into phrases with our neighbors, or deleted every third, fifth and sixth word in a line of text, or had to close our eyes and pick two words on a page and use them in the same sentence.... you get the idea.
The idea was that the best creative writing doesn't occur when you decide on the meaning and describe it in words, rather when you randomize words and derive meaning from chance encounters.
Of course none of our phrases made any sense (clearly we were amateurs), and being a highly logical thinker it drove me absolutely nuts. My professor would read aloud from books of her favorite poets, which usually sounded something like this:
Kiss my lips. She did.
Kiss my lips again she did.
Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.
I have feathers.
Gentle fishes.
Do you think about apricots. We find them very beautiful. It is not alone their color it is their seeds that charm us. We find it a change.
Lifting belly is so strange.
I came to speak about it.
Selected raisins well their grapes grapes are good.
Change your name.
Question and garden.
It's raining. Don't speak about it.
My baby is a dumpling. I want to tell her something. Wax candles. We have bought a great many wax candles. Some are decorated. They have not been lighted.
I do not mention roses.
Exactly.
Actually.
Question and butter.
I find the butter very good.
excerpt from Gertrude Stein's"Lifting Belly"
(Apparently this was a poem about pregnancy, though I'm still convinced the author had just overindulged, an interpretation that seemed to offend Serena for some reason.)
The class went on in that way for 10 weeks, and at the end everyone who had showed up got As and we went our separate ways. It wasn't until a few months had passed that I realized just how valuable the concept of "random" could be in life.
It hit me as I was trying to figure out a way to justify the work I've been doing at a youth leadership camp. My mother had asked me what it had to do with anything else I wanted to do with my life, and I had to think about it.
The truth is I've done a lot of things that haven't had anything to do with anything else in my life. I decided to spend a year in Germany in high school even though I didn't speak any German. I started studying Japanese at the beginning of last year though I have no connections to the country, have never been into anime and (wait for it) don't even like sushi. I design runway fashion out of trash for an environmental advocacy group in California, spent one Christmas break working as a Christmas angel, write for my school's business newspaper even though I'm not studying business, and dedicate a week every summer to working at a camp when I could be in DC doing fancy internships that I'm sure would look much more impressive on a resume.
But somehow, I find connections in the randomness that are astounding. I learned that my last name is actually a city in Germany, and that our last record from our ancestors was from a city just 60km away. I found out that my personality is much better suited to German culture than American, and fell in love with German sustainability, which turned into me making a traditional German dress out of German candy wrappers for a trash fashion show. After beginning Japanese I realized that Germany and Japan have a TON in common because of their World War Two histories, both going from shambles in the 40s to the third and fourth largest economies in the world today (I'm an econ minor). There are even types of traditional Christmas cake (which I learned about during my Christmas angel days) that are only made in Germany and Japan.
And when I randomly took a business class I learned that everything we teach at the leadership camp (teamwork, communication, empathy, integrity) are skills that are in high demand in business and for hiring in general. There's even a word for them ("soft skills") and I'm now writing my thesis on the importance of soft skill development to the economy, and my University in Germany I'll be at for study abroad has a research center for skill development. Somehow now I have the idea of combining my passion for education and soft skills with economics and international development by studying the economics of education in grad school. (One of three programs for this in the world is in London, where I've wanted to study since I was a kid)
My felt completely random until l I stopped compartmentalizing all of my hobbies and interests and passions and realized that the greatest meaning is derived from these "chance encounters." I figured out what I want to do with my life (maybe) because I just kept doing what I loved, even though it didn't fit into any sort of plan at the time. Now eventually, I'm figuring out a way to combine them into something I never would have arrived at by conventional methods.
But that's the thing about life-- you can't make a plan and fill it with all of the things that will take you from A to Z. If you do you put on blinders to all of the seemingly random opportunities that might end up making the most meaningful connections.
We are surrounded with a mentality of delayed gratification. That is, if you want to be a successful lawyer/doctor/researcher/business person or doctor or whatever it is, you have to fit in all of the classes and internships and practicums required, even if some of it is horrible. We take a huge gamble based on the promise of grandiose titles and salaries-- who knows at the age of 18 whether or not they would truly be happy as a surgeon? It is physically impossible, yet that is what college kids everywhere are expected to predict. You can never choose a major without at some point being asked "so what do you want to do with that?" Can't it just be enough that I enjoy studying international relations and economics to justify studying those things? With some majors it's easy to say what you'll do, because there is a well know position associated with it, like psychologist, doctor, artist, etc. But there are so many more things you can do with your life than be one of the ten cookie cutter jobs that we teach little kids with picture books. The thing is-- you just haven't heard of it yet.
In economics this is referred to as imperfect information. When we don't have all of the information, we are more likely to make irrational decisions, like thinking we have to choose one interest out of dozens and forget about all the rest, or leave them to gather dust on the shelf and be pulled out years later with the guilt and regret of abandoned dreams. We grow up thinking it's a zero sum game. You can be an artist OR a scientist. A doctor OR a teacher. We don't think of careers that might combine all of our talents, passions and interests because there are just too many jobs out there to learn about up front.
But here's the great irony: if we know that there are so many jobs out there we've never heard of, and in all likely hood something that combines everything we love-- why are we content to stick with one cookie cutter option, and leave the rest as tangential interests or hobbies? What is the real harm in saying "I have no effing clue" the next time someone asks you what you want to do with your major? Feeling judged for not having your life figured out at the age of 18?
Because life isn't a straight line, it's a game of connect the dots, where all of the dots are the things you love and the lines are the chance encounters and relationships that tie them all together.
Of course, some things are mutually exclusive. You can't become an astronaut/princess/ballerina/veteranarian/kindergarten teacher (sorry 5 year olds), and some things might have to be kept as hobbies or extra reading. But if you give these things up to make room for "necessary" things you don't enjoy, you miss out on the opportunity to see the crazy ways those "random" dots might tie into your life.
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