The Cost of Certainty

For a while, I didn’t understand what that meant. We’re constantly told having a plan is essential, that we need a clear future to strive toward. But I’ve realized that while we have the ability to be whatever we want, fixing ourselves to one rigid version of the future can be as limiting as having no direction at all. It’s easier to be rigid, more comfortable; you are not questioning yourself along the way or doubting each step. Keeping an open future is much harder. Nonetheless, having the chance to reinvent yourself each morning is a privilege.

 

Ever since I stepped foot on this campus, my future has felt uncertain. Before my year abroad, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted and where I was headed. Since then, that certainty and sense of direction have disappeared. I don’t even know which country I will be in next year.

 

At first that uncertainty was hard to accept. I always had a very specific idea of how I saw myself in the future. I knew what I wanted to study, where I wanted to live. By sixteen, that version of my future no longer fit. My future no longer had limits; it opened a sea of endless opportunities. I used to believe there was one path that I was meant to follow. Now I realized I wasn’t limited to it. And what once felt frightening now feels like possibility.

 

We demand clarity from the world, but the world was never designed to make sense. We are not meant to know whether we are making the “right” or “wrong” choice, because there is no such thing. There are only choices and what we make of them, different outcomes we can’t fully predict.

 

Life is messy. It isn’t meant to be read like a manual or solved like a problem. It’s meant to be lived. And the most honest thing we can do is stop forcing certainty and allowing things to unfold just as they are.

 

The one thing I hope you take from this: you don’t need absolute clarity to move forward. Move confused but move forward. Make mistakes. Learn from them. Choose, and let life flow from there.