On Chasing After One's Hat

At 11:56 pm, in the second floor lounge of my dorm, there are kids finding corners to skype their friends in semi-privacy.   Above me, on the third floor balcony, there is a girl enjoying her cup-o-noodles over a collage of papers.  I am out here debating on whether to make this a late night or an early morning.

 700 words stand between me and my pillow.  They are due at 9:30 am tomorrow morning. I will punch, tear, or coax my way through them if need be.

Starting assignments is the longest part of the process for me, because I love titles.  When I interviewed for the scholarship that I didn't get, but inadvertently led to my life being what it now beautifully is, I spent half of the hour I was given choosing a title and a font for the essay I was prompted to write.

As I said, I didn't get the scholarship.  I did, however, end up getting two jobs and some of the best friends I could possibly imagine out of it.  I'm now extremely grateful not to have gotten that scholarship, because I think it might have ruined me.  It would have given me a sense of responsibility toward some sort of greatness that I wasn't ready for.  I'm afraid I might have felt pressured to reach for Greatness in a strictly academic, bullet-point sense, and that would have ruined me in the quietest and cleanest way possible.

But back to my grief when it comes to beginnings. After I have a title, everything follows.  Everything flows.  I have to give my piece a hat, or the rest of the outfit just doesn't come to me.

Sometimes I feel like this is how a lot of us entered education.  We were told to pick a title.  Business, Mathematics, Architecture, Music Performance, Journalism -- we were told to pick a hat.  There is no room for a man of many different hats, or a man of indecisive hats.  If you find that your hat doesn't fit, if it flies off in the wind, you need to chase it down, or find a new hat in a hurry.  I wonder when education began to be a game of chasing after one's hat.

Within the past year, due to various time crunches, I've had to do the impossible: begin without a title.  And, do you know what I've found?
By the end of the paper, a title just crops up.  Like an excavated artifact which could not have been identified without the beginning of some digging and dusting, the purpose develops out of the ideas and connections that interest me.  The title was there all along, but I had to begin without knowing its name.

I'd like to think that there are things worth chasing besides our own titles.

I have seen people with well-thought-out life plans meet the same ends as those who go through life with little or no clue about the next bend in the journey.  I have seen both end up stumbling upon what they love to do,  which directs them along a path they could not have possibly foreseen.  (And isn't this the best any of us could possibly hope for?) This is a path that is far better than one they could have devised on their own.  And I think it's quite possible that the best titles are stumbled upon on the way towards what inspires and captures us.

What if we thought of our education less like a well-put-together outfit suitable for the public eye, and more like a newborn... to be nurtured, cherished, and christened only after it has been fully formed and is ready to leave the womb.  When I leave this place, my education will be messy, scared, and still always, continually growing.  Yet, my hope is that it will be more complex and alive and inspired than any hat could ever hope to be.