How do we define what the right thing to do is? By what we feel? What we’re told? What we so in the media? Centuries ago you used to only do the right thing by what your own definition of it was, there weren’t these millions of sources to refer to.

Have you ever done something that you believe to be the right thing and when it’s over you know right away just how wrong you were? As humans we’re conditioned to regret that thing, but I feel like we have to think that it happened for a reason. We weren’t made to constantly fail (or at least I like to think that’s the case), so then there has to be something for us to learn from otherwise we’d never grow and succeed.

Before there was school, the internet, television, all of these mediums that guide our ever changing (possible evolving) thinking… there was us. Human beings. Doing things and teaching ourselves.

Look at Adam and Eve. Eve was told to not eat the apple. Was it the right thing to do? Probably not in the context of situation at that time, but would we all be here if she hadn’t?

Okay, so you aren’t spiritual. Well what about Rosa Parks. It wasn’t the right thing for her to do, to sit in the front of the bus, but would we all be sharing one world today? She was the inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr. to start the Civil Rights Movement, so we really don’t know.

I thought about this all today as I tried to figure out if I was doing the right thing by graduating school a year early. It’s been a goal of mine for so long, to graduate college in three years, do the one year master program at my school, and then move away some place where music makes the city go round. Now that I am weeks away from achieving this I feel lost. Like I made the wrong decision somehow. Like everyone who told me it was stupid to rush my life away is somewhere behind a double-sided mirror pointing and laughing.

I’m feeling like I want to walk in that cap and gown with my boyfriend and best friends beside me. Like I want to experience Senior week with those I’ve gone through every class with, not just year-older acquaintances.

But as I wrote this I started to think… maybe nothing is “the right thing.” Maybe we make our own destiny by doing “the wrong thing” and learning from it. Who knows where I’ll be a year from now, three years from now, but I like to think that I will look back on this major accomplishment (that’s what I have to keep reminding myself it is), and feel like I wouldn’t be the person I am without it.

“Remember rights that I did wrong, so here I go…”