Does anyone really know what they are doing?

The point I am in right now in my life, I could really use a school reunion. Either primary or high school reunion.

I’m not ready for a reunion with my university mates just yet. Perhaps in another decade, when I’m in my thirties.

I just want to meet everyone, at least everyone who can show up, and see what they have been up to since our school days.

Unfortunately, no one seems to want to take that initiative and organise one. I doubt I have the social capacity to take that initiative myself.

I haven’t been great at staying in touch with many people I went to school with, so getting them together again to reminisce on the good old days would be difficult.

But I would like to know who married who, who has kids already, who has a big-shot job somewhere in the government, and who is planning to climb Mt Kenya in September.

I already know most of these things through the friends I managed to track down through social media, but having a real-life conversation with them is what I really crave.

I want to ask them real questions, like, "Do you know what you’re doing?”

I want to know if they feel the same way I do about various things in life.

“What I’m doing is having a conversation with you, is it not?”

“No, I mean do you know what you are doing in life?”

Let’s face it, most of us have no idea what we are doing or where we are going.

We’re not even sure we are on the right bus or at the right station going in the right direction.

It just seemed clearer when we were in school.

The thing to do was to get good grades, get to a good school and then get a great career.

Now we’re done with school (most of us), and it’s just not a straight line anymore.

We’re working in fields we didn’t study in, we are living quite unorthodox lives: like having ‘baby mamas’ left right and centre, when we thought we would be in blissful, faithful, monogamous marriages.

But the most crippling of these feelings in the ‘real world’ is Imposter Syndrome: the constant feeling of self-doubt that attacks us many times, making us feel like frauds at work, in our relationships and in the community.

I guess I should take it as a normal feeling because a new season in life does not exactly come with a manual to help us navigate.

In fact, everyone is basically just winging it in life, and no one really knows what they are doing until they have done it.

So, if I was to attend a school reunion, I would be there to let everyone know that it is okay if we don’t really know what we are doing because we have never really done it in the first place (whatever it is).

Even if we could learn from the experience of people older than us who have walked where we are walking now, we would still be amateurs.

Being an amateur is not the worst thing in the world. Eventually, an amateur becomes an expert.