Alex C.
Photography by Emma Joseph
If you’re reading this, remember that changing the plan is okay.
If I get the chance to know you, chances are, you’ll hear me say I “live, laugh, love” my Google calendar, and it’s true. If you ask me to grab coffee on Saturday, you best believe that it will become a calendar event in my life. If my mom tells me she’s visiting three months from now or within the hour, it will be in my calendar.
I find comfort in having a plan. Realistically, having a plan for tomorrow is pretty good, but it can be easy to get caught up in the plan for the rest of our lives. When I was a freshman in high school, I wanted to become a neurosurgeon and study at Brown University. One year later, I wanted to be a biomedical engineer and study at Johns Hopkins University. Next was mechanical engineering at MIT, and finally international business at Wake Forest University, where I am now.
At every point in my life, I had a 10-year plan, and I still do. When the plan changed, like what I wanted to study in college as a freshman, I would struggle with the stress and anxiety of redesigning the plan for the next 10 years, overwhelmed with the feeling of being out of control. I would struggle with a plan that I created on 1,000 hypotheticals, perhaps simply with the goal of feeling accomplished and being afraid of falling short.
Don’t hear me say that a long-term plan is bad. It’s not. In fact, a long-term plan allows you to set goals and have direction moving forward (beyond the coffee with a friend on Saturday). That said, when the plan has to change because life happened, you learned something new about yourself, or circumstances simply shifted, it is okay. Ultimately, your life will never fall according to your life plan. You have to acknowledge that your life plan is for an imaginary, perfect version of yourself in an imaginary, perfect version of the world around you. Neither of which exist. Failing our own expectations is simply falling short of our plan for ourselves – a plan that can change.
So, be willing to change the plan – be willing to fall short of it. It took me a long time to learn that. For me, having faith in the God who created the universe, who has laid my path out for me, has given me comfort in the volatility. A friend of mine would always end his prayers with, “We
may not know what tomorrow holds, but we know who holds tomorrow.” There is nothing we can do to change tomorrow, but we can adapt in its wake and live to the best of our ability today.
If you’re reading this, remember that changing the plan is okay. Tomorrow never comes, so all we can do is live today to the best of our ability. And as we do that, we learn the only thing truly worth worrying about is how we live this very moment, not the next one, not the last one, but this one, right here, right now. Be present.
Sincerely,
Alex C., Wake Forest University
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