I don’t know what i’m doing with my life

“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life”

It fell so suddenly out of my lips. It was meant to be a joke and so it was followed by a light chuckle. He stared at me as he sipped his tea slowly, careful not to let whatever it was that flickered in his eyes become known to me.

As he dropped his teacup on the table between us, he chuckled faintly, “that’s okay”, he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing either”.

After that, silence hung in the air but this time, it felt different because uncertainty was mixed in it and a grey misty cloud floated above us.

When I was 5, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a doctor. When I was 10, I wanted to be an engineer and at 15, I thought being a journalist was my calling but I had grown to be 19 and the big picture was only something I could dream about. The more I dreamt, the more I realized I was still standing on one tiny little piece in a 1000 piece puzzle.

What made it harder to cope with feeling like a speck in the big picture? Not everyone was like him. Not everyone admitted so easily that they didn’t know what they were doing either. Everyone else was acting as though they were okay and had it all figured out because they were worried about what the other person would think. I saw it in their eyes when they mentally compared themselves to others and heard the hesitation in their voices when they had to speak about their lives.

What they didn’t know was that everyone was too bothered about themselves as well. Everyone is too caught up in their own lives and they should be too.

Nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow

They aren’t. They weren’t. They never were.

– unknown.

He glanced outside the window next to us as he turned the tea in his cup with a little spoon, careful not to let them hit each other. He turned back to me as he took it out and I was almost lost in the spiral dance of the milk in the tea until he spoke.

“Since we’re always changing our minds“, he smiled, “knowing it all now would be a waste of time, wouldn’t it?”

I nodded once. He was right. We could always say “I want to be doing this” or “I would like to be doing that” but we need to understand that we can’t fully predict what the bigger picture looks like. We can only imagine, dream, and walk towards it. Along the way, we could develop different interests and realize one thing.

We can always change.