Finding Your Own Path
Life sometimes turns out not at all as we planned. And that can be a very good thing.
Take my life, for example. As an undergraduate, I had it all planned: I was going to be a career woman in corporate public relations or a professional writer, living in a large city — Chicago, perhaps — unencumbered by family demands because I decided I did not want children. Fast forward a couple of decades and here I sit, in the living room of my home in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, a mother of two sons, a lawyer, and a law professor.
How and when did that master plan change? As I think it must be for most people, there wasn’t necessarily one grand event that put me on a different path. Instead, it was little choices I made along the way, little, but, as it turned out, significant choices, such that one day I woke up and realized I was in a place that vastly differed from where I thought I’d be. When I think of it, I am always reminded of something author Marion Winik said in her book Rules for the Unruly: Living an Unconventional Life: “The path is not straight.”