Accidental Mom

Welcome to an Accidental Mom's world

The third decade begins 

Twenty years ago this week, I graduated from college. I was thrilled to have finished, and excited about my future--which I had, of course, mapped out in detail for the next several years. In fact, only a few weeks earlier, I'd talked with the director of my college's career development office about my plan. She was surveying a random sample of graduating seniors for a long-term study about career choices, and I took great delight in telling her how I would go from graduation to grad school, grad school to career ladder, and then straight up. Oh, and I was going to do this in about four years. As I was leaving her office, she said, "It certainly sounds like you've thought this through. I look forward to hearing about your progress!"

Gentle reader, you can surely hear the other shoe waiting to drop.

It's true that I'd thought about what I should do, but I'd given precious little consideration to what I might want to do, or where, or why. Like so many of my fellow overachievers, I was used to aiming for the targets set by my family and my teachers, without ever thinking much about whether those same targets would motivate me without the approval and accolades of those authority figures.

Twenty years later, I can comfortably report that I failed to meet a single one of the targets I'd so confidently set in the spring of my senior year. And while I have endured many disappointments, embarrassments, and failures, I know that my life is far richer and more rewarding because I was willing to cast aside a plan that appealed only to my head, and follow my heart.

In the intervening years, I've had many, many opportunities to work with people who are facing similar challenges. I've listened to college seniors confess, miserably, that they don't want to go to business school, but can't imagine how they'll tell their parents. I've worked with mid-career professionals who suddenly realize that they have achieved all of the goals on their list, without gaining any of the happiness or satisfaction they were sure would be theirs. And after hearing the stories, and handing them tissues, I tell them all the same thing: No life is wasted if we learn from our experience.

We may not always feel good about the choices we've made, but it's never too late to feel good about the next one. We can't erase past disappointments and failures, but we can use them to make wiser, better decisions in the future. And perhaps most important, we can't know what the future will bring, so it's best to make our choices based on who we are now, and not who we think we will be (or should be) at some undetermined future moment.

In the coming weeks, many of us will attend graduation ceremonies, and we may be sorely tempted to ask the graduates, "So, what are your plans?"

Resist the temptation. Congratulate them for what they've accomplished and wish them well. And remind them that the only path to success is the one that goes where their hearts take them.