Do-overs

Think back...when you were 10 or 15 years old, what did you want to be? And did your life's calling change as you matured? If you didn't become the teacher/nurse/firefighter/doctor/computer whiz that you expected to be, do you ever wonder what your life would be now had you taken that other path? Throughout high school, I wanted to be a speech pathologist. I'm not sure why because I didn't know any speech pathologists and I don't recall there being any television shows that featured speech pathologists - remember we only got 2 channels and I think they went off the air at midnight. I don't even recall knowing anyone who had a speech impediment. My other assumption was that I would attend Minot State College...because, it had the best speech pathology program. Seemed pretty straight forward to me. My parents, however, felt I should go to a college where I knew someone. And that's how I ended up at North Dakota State University. A good friend from high school (she was a year older) was there and two fellow classmates were also going there. Funny thing is that I seldom saw any of them once we were on campus. Our lives changed...we met new people, made new friends, took on new interests. The other thing that changed - quarterly, it seemed - was my choice of careers. At the time, NDSU didn't have a speech pathology major so I flopped back and forth between some sort of med tech program (I liked the idea of wearing a white coat - again, don't ask where it came from. I was 18 and that should be explanation enough.) and whatever else was the "newest flavor" of majors. I finally ended up in Journalism and Technical Writing. I'd learned to love to write in high school. Mr. Iszler was my English/Journalism teacher during my senior year, and he was a great teacher. He's the one who made me love writing. The technical writing part? Well, when I was college, tech writing was just coming into its own. There weren't a lot of us and many people, including my Mom, had no idea what a tech writer was, let alone what we wrote about. Personal computers existed somewhere in the future. All of our writing was done using a paper, a pencil, and a typewriter. It was during that time when I began slipping a pencil behind my ear so I'd always have one handy - and I still do that from time to time. Tech writing for me was a natural. Everything was black and white, step-by-step, no colorful adjectives were allowed. I loved it. Randy and I talk periodically about do-overs. Would we be happier or more content had we chosen different careers? And where would we have landed if we had chosen different career paths? And just what would those careers have been? So, that's the question to ponder...if you could and there was nothing to hold you back, would you make a different choice? Of course, that always leads to the thought that if we had selected a path, would we have met; was our meeting destiny or coincidence? I like to think it was destiny.