When It's Right

I was thinking today, on my miserable 5 am drive to work, how people know when things are right. A lot of people have been asking me if I will stay in teaching after my two years with Teach for America, and I answer them every time with "I have no idea." Anyway, part of it is that right now, I don't look past 2:15 pm until I get there.

In my zombie state this morning (one made much worse than usual because of a pretty sucky day yesterday) I wondered if I would ever feel "right" in teaching, wondered if that "this is for me" moment happens right at the beginning, in those first few minutes or hours of the first day of school.

If that's true, then I made a very poor decision.

But then I got to thinking about other things, other places where people always claim to feel "rightness" and I think that those kind of realizations don't happen because your pre-conceived expectations have been met. I think it's more than you are exposed to all these new things, things you don't have expectations for because you've never even considered them before. I thought about all my friends, the ones that have been there for me through everything, and how I came to know it was right. It wasn't because they ranked well on some generic checklist accepted by the general population. It's because some part of them came completely out of the blue and surprised me, whether it was some incredibly strange personality trait, an ability to make fun of me in a way that was absolutely hilarious, or simply the fact that they owned a red cape and liked vampires (oh, how we make friends in elementary school...).

I guess it comes down to that in any part of life. In jobs, in friends, in relationships-- we find that "right" person or place or thing (whatever it may be) when we find something intangible, something that blows our expectations out of the water, something we could have never counted on until we have it, and then suddenly we don't know where we would be without it.