Not According to Plan

If you had asked me a few years ago where I wanted to be in the future, there is no way I would have answered ‘in China’. Even as I sit here and write this, I still feel a sense of bewilderment when I think about how I came to be in this position. All my life, I’ve worked towards building a solid plan for my future. I knew at age 13 that I wanted to major in English literature. At age 16, I dreamed of living in London. At age 17, I wanted to be a lawyer. But in the past year, all of those things I used to want are gone, either replaced or forgotten. I find that my life has become a series of compromises, new discoveries, and changes that leave me awkwardly fumbling to catch up. And yet, despite the fact that my life is not going the way I planned it to, I find myself being happier than I’ve ever been before. I’m happy living the life I have, rather than the one I spent all my life dreaming I would want. As a kid growing up in an Indo-Canadian household, ‘plan’ was an all-important word and spelled with a capital P. Conversations with my dad always ended in questions like “so what’s The Plan?” The acceptable response was something like: I will go to X, Y, or Z college, I will major in this, and then graduate and do that. Saying, I don’t know was never an option. For me going to NYU Shanghai was never part of “The Plan”. I applied on a whim, but once I got accepted, I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere else. I was curious and nervous all at once. And that’s when my Plan fell completely apart like a tower of Jenga. Suddenly, not only was I majoring in something I had never even considered, and taking classes which I might not have ordinarily taken an interest in, but I was doing so in a city where I didn’t know the language, where the air and traffic seemed to be out to kill me, and all in a school that was itself a towering pile of uncertainty; the interminable question mark. And despite all of this, despite not knowing what I’m doing half the time, despite the frustration and the anger and the fear and the doubt, I love it here. God, I LOVE IT here. I’ve learnt so much from my time here at NYU Shanghai; things about myself, about others, and about life. But if I had to pick one thing to tell my peers, our new freshman class, or anyone else reading this, it would be this: Forget your plans. All my life I’ve always heard, “you need to have a plan for your future! You need to be a responsible adult.” But that has always seemed so contradictory to me because I think the most adult thing you can do is accept that life doesn’t always work out the way that you want it to, but that doesn’t make it the end of the world. Don’t get so caught in planning your life that you forget to live it. Life is the moments you look back on and laugh: “Wow I can’t believe we did that!” You can’t plan life. Life is what happens to you. Life is the interesting conversations you have with new people, it happens in the silence of the early mornings and the laughter late at night. Life is sleeping too late, procrastinating, cutting corners. It’s realizing that sometimes we won’t live up to the impossibly high standards and plans we set for ourselves but that’s okay. It’s realizing that sometimes, we don’t know and we shouldn’t try to. We’re not always sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in business… If only I’d gotten involved in student government as a freshman … If only I’d thought to apply for this or for that… Now, as a sophomore, I can’t wait to see where life will take me next and what more this city has to offer. We’re so young, and life is too short to spend it planning. We have mistakes to make, interests to discover, and people to meet. I don’t know what this year has in store for me any more than you do for you. And when the doubt creeps in and the uncertainty sets, all we can do is take a deep breath and do what feels right for us at that moment, plan or no plan. This article was written by Rae Dehal. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Rae Dehal