Not Knowing Is Okay

This article was supposed to start with the names of a few famous people who have changed their career multiple times or very late in life and have still managed to make it to the top. So I did a google search and found a lot many of them. But you can find that list yourself right? Also, when I was going through the list, I realized that I don’t need these names to make my point. Even if the list had no names I would still believe that shaming people who are not sure about their lives is quite hypocritical. Because, really, who is sure? What we want in life at a particular moment is mostly about what we feel at that point in time. And voila, feelings change!

In a world where even the waiter expects you to choose from ten different kinds of coffee, there is an incessant pressure to always know what you want. Most of us have gotten used to it. We have gotten so used to it that we expect everyone around us to be sure all the time. In pursuit of stability and success, one is expected to choose a path and then stick to it, no matter what. In a society that fancies commitment and glorifies it to the extent that women are asked to stick to their spouses’ even when the marriage is not working out, it is difficult to admit that what you chose, maybe, five years ago is not what you want to choose today.

There are so many examples in our everyday lives where people are shamed by their family and friends when they decide to change a path. It’s not difficult to find that 43-year old who wants to leave his job and start a business or a 22-year old engineering graduate who wants to pursue arts or a 50-year old who want to get rid of a toxic marriage or a 17-year old who doesn’t know what to do in life. These people are all around us. Some of them have made the decision and have gotten past all the discouragement and flak but some are still on this side struggling to make their way through.

   

Denial is easy. Not admitting that you made a wrong choice or just that you made a choice that worked for you then but is not working now is easy while admitting it is not. It takes an immense amount of courage to admit to yourself and to others that you want to change the course of your life.  The law of inertia, given by Sir Issac Newton, states that it is the tendency of an object to resist a change in motion. That is, an object at rest will stay at rest or an object in motion will stay in motion, unless it is acted on by an external force. If one looks closely this is as true for human beings as it is for an object. It’s easier to stay in a toxic marriage than to call it out; it’s easier to continue that 9 to 5 job than to leave it for a venture that you want to start on your own. Even when the destination is changed in your head, it’s easier to go with the flow than to stop and turn.

Instead of calling these people courageous and appreciating them to be able to choose better for themselves, we, as a society, shame them. We call them unstable and indecisive and make them feel guilty about taking too many turns. We discourage them by saying that not sticking by to your previous decision means running away. We, as a society, make them believe that their brave choice is an act of cowardice. And we all do it, without realizing, in our everyday lives.

Not knowing is okay. Making a change does not always mean that one is incapable of commitment. Terri Trespicio in her Ted talk “Stop searching for your passion” says that the idea that one has to know what one is supposed to do is dangerously limiting. She says that “she is leery of passion for a few reasons. One of them is that passion is not a plan, it’s a feeling and feelings change. You can be passionate about a person one day, a job, and then not passionate the next. We know this and yet we continue to use passion as the yardstick to judge everything by.”

So, the next time when someone comes to tell you that their childhood dream is not something that they want to pursue anymore, try and not judge them immediately. Try and not tell them that they are fickle-minded and that they need to be certain about their choices. Try and hear them out maybe?