Decorating doesn’t come naturally to me. I know plenty of women, my sister included, who love to match up colors and textures that tie a room or a party together. They somehow manage to take joy out of it.
For me, I take the Big Lebowski approach to home design — that rug tied the whole room together, man. My bedroom wall is decorated with a handful of pictures and handwritten quotes by authors more well-spoken than myself, including “Be not afraid,” and “The future is no more uncertain than the present.”
The former is a St. John Paul II quote and the latter is Walt Whitman, but they go hand in hand. One of the “mistakes” young people make is to bracket their future with plans for all their crazy dreams.
I was going to settle down right after college and somehow manage a night shift as a lab tech in a hospital at the same time. Thank goodness that plan fell through.
Why do we do this? Why are we enamored with control? I suppose it has something to do with the same reason Staples has a whole aisle full of day planners.
People love order and routine as much in adulthood as kids do at bedtime, at least for the most part. I think part of it stems from the spooky unknown shadows of the future, though, too.
One of the things I have learned in my short 21 years on this earth is that it is almost impossible for everything to go according to plan. Here’s where “don’t be afraid” comes in.
It takes a bit of faith to go through life without knowing what comes tomorrow or next week, but that’s life. My boyfriend and I made it through three months of communicating only through letters after talking for six months on the philosophy of taking it “day by day.”
I wasn’t sure if he was reading every letter I sent, or even receiving them for that matter, but I still wrote every day. There was a point where I faced anxiety about the future, but I had to trust there would be time for that to unravel itself.
Last year around this time, I listened to my sister complain about her teachers critiquing her decision to get engaged during her senior year of high school. While it had nothing to do with them, they probably felt a responsibility toward her to remind her how quickly things change.
Lucky for her, change worked out in her favor and she gives us updates on UK life from Facetime. Carly is more like an exception than the rule, but I think there’s a lesson here.
It’s OK to have big dreams. Just because the future isn’t set in stone doesn’t mean you can’t work toward whatever you envision 10 years from now — whether it’s an Old Tudor-style house or an apartment in New York.
I would like to be a staff writer on a big city paper or teach English in a one-room schoolhouse, whichever comes first. You might not be able to have everything on the list for your five-year plan, but it can’t hurt to have an idea of what that entails.

KELSEY GHERING
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