I wonder if the reason that I haven’t been getting the dreaded question, “What are you doing next year?” is because I’ve resorted to a comfortable hermitage, surrounding myself with thesis and friends who share my confusion. But warding off the questions successfully doesn’t necessarily mean that the stress of senior year can be kept at bay. With so much uncertainty on the horizon, it’s hard to escape the fog of panic that occasionally engulfs all of us to-be-graduating Scripps students.
As I walk across Bowling Green Lawn, I sometimes imagine each senior walking purposefully with a bubble bursting with questions hovering over their heads. Where is my thesis going? Where will I live? What kind of work will I do? Graduate school or job? How will I pay my loans? What if my parents need my help at home? And sometimes the mundane turns existential—what is the larger purpose of all this work?
Sometimes when I’m in the middle of multiple forces pulling me in different directions, it’s easy to forget that others are going through similar moments of crisis. Especially when others seem to project “confidence, courage, and hope,” I wonder why I am the anomaly among these inspiring women. These days, it’s easy for me to feel unmoored. I believed that I had carved a path through the chaos of endless options by embracing politics, activism, art, and writing in a way that made sense to me. Now, I find myself wondering about the hazards of pursuing too much and never gaining an expertise in one area. I pause on the questions that multiply at alarming rates, overpowering the answers.
When I get stuck in worrying about the questions, I often think of one of my favorite quotes by poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Learning to love the questions themselves is a difficult task, especially when we live in a world that is focused on products and answers. Our society drives us to competition and self-doubt. But when we constantly doubt our accomplishments and compare ourselves to others, we lose sight of our daily successes—finishing that paper for Victorian literature, leading a successful club meeting, conversing in Spanish for the first time at the lunch table. More importantly, we lose our ability to see that with our seemingly insignificant daily choices to love ourselves and support our friends, we are “living into the answers.”
I want to end this post with a beautiful lesson from “Life After Scripps” week, elegantly summed up in one image—success as the twisted arrow that curves in many chaotic directions before it shoots into infinity. The future is too complicated to be mapped as linear trajectories, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t find answers in the curves and digressions.
