During my freshman orientation, the college president gave our class an opening speech: “Don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to major in,” he comforted us. “Even if you think you know, the majority of college students change their major at least once. So, take your time to explore, and find out what it is you want to do.” 

I tuned out the rest of his speech, convinced it didn’t apply to me. I had known I was going to major in music since before I had graduated from high school. College was just a stepping stone on my musical path, a path to which I was thoroughly dedicated with my entire soul. Let me just get in and out, I thought, so I could get on with my life as a professional musician.

Four years later, the subject of the commencement speaker’s speech at graduation was disconcertingly similar in subject and tone. “Don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to do with your life,” he reassured us. “Your twenties are for exploration, for discovery. Statistically, most people don’t really get started on their main career until they are thirty.” The difference this time, though, was that rather than tuning out the speaker, I was riveted, hungrily sopping up every word he spoke. I was hopelessly lost, twenty-one years old with the thought “what am I going to do with my life?” swimming through my head unrelentingly.

What had changed in those four years since my freshman commencement? Had the president been talking to me after all? No; my mind and heart had remained as passionately dedicated to music as they were my freshman year. It was my body that had faltered. During my sophomore year, I had developed incapacitating joint and muscle pain caused by a previously undiagnosed connective tissue disorder. An incurable genetic condition had cast a dark cloud over my aspirations of playing music professionally, and I was now consumed by the fear and uncertainty of not having a focus to my life. 

Most people struggle with not knowing what to do in life because they haven’t found their path. But what does one do when he has found his path, when fate has come clearly and triumphantly knocking, but circumstances rip that path out from under his feet? I couldn’t wait for the answer to come for me. It already had come, but my path was blocked.

Or was it? Physical therapy, alternative medicine, and nutritional interventions gave me a great deal of hope for making progress with my joint pain and being able to pursue a career. This was all up in the air, though. Even if I could overcome my disability, it would take quite a bit of time, with no way to know how much progress I could make. No one could tell me definitively “you can overcome this,” nor could they tell me “this is too much of a handicap for you to play bass.” This ambiguity also manifested in my playing ability. It’s not that I couldn’t play at all; neither could I play with all the strength and facility that I needed.

Having no way to predict the degree to which I could overcome my handicap, I oscillated between two different life-philosophies: should I “never give up on my dreams” and “reach for the stars,” as all the motivational posters on my high school walls had taught me, or should I release my attachment and squarely face the reality of the present?

On the one hand, the latter approach seemed more alluring, being close to my Buddhist leanings. I was struck by a quote by Joseph Campbell: “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” My love of writing, a former career aspiration before the passion of music had consumed me, had started to re-emerge and present itself as a more viable path. On the other hand, there was something inside me that simply refused to let go. Sometimes I interpreted that as stubborn attachment to a deluded hope, but more often, it felt like a sacred calling. Letting go preemptively, without being absolutely sure that it was necessary, would be a betrayal of my soul. 

Each time I made a decision, seemingly out of an epiphany of self-awareness and conviction, competing urges or anxieties soon crept in and took hold. Thus, I spent my first few years out of college living in a place of not-knowing. The stakes seemed impossibly high: if I were to continue pursuing a career as a bassist and not succeed, I would have spent the formative years of my life digging myself into a ditch, essentially “missing” my early adulthood, or so it seemed. Within me lay so much potential for succeeding at something, for achieving a high level of artistry and creative advancement, and the desire to do so burned constantly. Was I wasting my life by refusing to let go of a path that was clearly blocked, instead of flourishing within another field? The more time went on, the more anxious and agitated I became by having gotten nowhere in my life.

The opposite choice, though, seemed more tragic. What if I were to give up on my dream for the sake of moving forward in life, but there were still hope, still some possibility of overcoming my condition? Every time I decided to let go, I soon swung back in the opposite direction. After telling myself I needed to move on and commit my time and energy towards something else, I would catch a glimmer of hope. I would have a good day — or a good month — where my joints would suddenly start feeling much better, where an herbal treatment or dietary supplement would seem to be working wonders. I would play a concert that reminded me of how essential playing the bass is to my innermost being. In these moments, it seemed clearer than the brightest day that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that I could do besides music. It was as if the rest of my life was in black-and-white, and only while playing bass did the world suddenly become flooded with vibrant color. So, I would become newly committed — and then, of course, my problems would resurface, plunging me back into doubt.

So, I made no choice. And yet, life had to be lived. I continued to agonize over “what to do with my life” while pulling in a meager income teaching private music lessons, supplemented here and there by substitute teaching, driving a bike taxi, washing dishes, house-sitting, dog-walking, and other odd jobs that popped up. The whole time, I also worked as a gigging bassist, though my physical capabilities were still unreliable. Gigs simply came up, and one-by-one, I accepted them. Sometimes I turned them down. Sometimes I had to take Ibuprofen, but I got through them. Often I wanted to throw in the towel because of my physical struggles, but I needed the money, so I continued to play. 

As much as I remained focused on the future, the undeniable fact that my life was here forced me to start living before I had figured out what exactly I wanted to do. Without deciding whether to “be” a professional bassist or not, without deciding whether to let go or hold on, I still was a professional bassist, to a degree. It wasn’t my full-time job, but the more I did it, the more it amounted to something.

I was stuck in the narrative of going to college, choosing something to major in, graduating, and then being that “something,” as if we go through an assembly line and come out the other end with an “identity.” As it turns out, real life is much more subtle and intricate. I put various pieces together as I needed to at the time, an amalgam of teaching, performing, odd jobs, and hobbies that might later lead to professional activity. After so much agonizing over trying to fit myself into one well-defined box, I realized that life actually supports the multiplicity and ambiguity I felt over my life’s direction. I had been searching for my path, but all the while, I was following multiple paths at once, none of them in conflict with the other. Each of those “careers” — whether teaching, performing, writing, or anything else — was formed gradually, one step at a time. Most crucially, those paths were created in the present, not in an imaginary abstract future.

Isn’t this more how life actually works? People go to a job and develop a craft at night; people have multiple careers at once, or in succession; people start their own businesses and create their own work; people go back to school at age 40, or 50, or 60. Unforeseeable life events cause people to take completely different turns, to be discovered, to become famous, or to lose everything and start over. People start off as lawyers or businessmen and then quit to follow their passion, and other people start off as artists or musicians and go back to school in mid-life to get a stable day job.

Thinking in terms of strictly “holding on to” or “letting go of” my dreams of being a professional bassist now seemed overly simplistic. Reviewing how my life had progressed so far, I saw that there is, in fact, no need to search for an “identity” in order to have a sense of control over my life’s direction. I had managed to move forward in multiple disciplines, not by deciding to “be” any of those things, but simply by doing them. Without having committed to an identity as a bassist, teacher, writer, or anything else, I nevertheless had committed to playing bass, teaching, and writing, either out of economic necessity or inward compulsion.

Now, whenever I hear phrases like “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I cringe. While good-intentioned, this question emphasizes being over doing, identity over action. It puts life off into the future, as though we have to first figure it out fully-formed, and then actualize it. Instead, we must accept that our life is already here, and our task is to start acting on our potential however we are able to now, and to continue that process throughout our lives, building ourselves step by step, piece by piece.

I often wish that I could be the one standing at a podium addressing a crowd of incoming college freshmen, or, perhaps an even more confused and anxious bunch, a group of impending college graduates. I would tell them what I wish someone could have told me when I was in the midst of my crisis: 

Stop worrying about what to “be” – just do. “What should I do with my life” is not a one-and-done question, something you’ll simply figure out at age 18 and then do until you die. Rather, it is something you will be asking yourself continuously throughout your life, as long as there is more life to live. Don’t “find” yourself; build yourself — starting now.