Yes, make good choices, because it’s all you control

In the fall of my senior year at UAH, I was an intern at Champion International Corporation in Courtland. It was a large paper mill, on the river a couple of miles west of the nuclear plant. (A lot of the structure is still there, but the mill changed ownership and then closed several years ago.) I worked on a thrice-weekly employee newsletter and helped with a few other documentation tasks. It was as an intern at Champion that I fully realized I wanted to be a technical writer.

I went two days a week, and I had to be at my desk at 6 in the morning. It was still much more dark than light when I approached the facility, and all its lights made quite the sight. I can remember enjoying it one morning and thinking “wow, this is pretty cool. Soon I’ll have a real professional job.”

I wanted to work at Champion when I graduated, but that didn’t pan out. In fact, after I got out of school, I wouldn’t start working at Intergraph—my first paid job in my field—for 19 months. Intervening would be a brief but important foray into car sales, as well as my only genuine broken heart.

It certainly didn’t go like I thought it would. Now part of that was being 20 years old, but another big part of it was just that such is the state of things.

Our minds protect us from truly contemplating how little we control. The works of our day-to-day lives are considerably more delicate than we pretend they are. This can be terrifying, but it can also be liberating.

“Make good choices” has become something of a cliché, but the brutal reality is that it’s about all we can do. I can have an excellent idea of the picture I’m trying to paint, and make good, disciplined, purposeful strokes in an effort to realize my vision. It still might turn out to be something else. However, the fidelity of the eventuality is enhanced, and its goodness significantly enhanced, if I still take day-to-day care to do well.

I think that as recently as 10 years ago, it would have frightened me to realize that so starkly. It’s almost soothing to me now.

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