Full of Possibility

It's really interesting to me how hard it can be to predict how things will work out. The problems that crop up and need to be solved are seldom the ones that I was able to anticipate ahead of time. The things that become important are often things that began small, and didn't seem so significant in the moment.

A few years ago I took a trip to Ann Arbor to attend a training about implementing a particular assessment measure. It was a mundane, 36-hour trip. The training ended up being useless. But the trip totally changed my career. Somehow when I was there I came up with a new idea for the career grant I was planning to write. I knew the idea I currently had wasn't working that well, and I wasn't totally excited about it. But something that day sparked a brand new idea and as soon as I had it, I knew it was the right one. All the pieces fit together just right, and it was the perfect conglomeration of everything I had done so far and wanted to do moving forward. So I ended up using the 8-hour useless training session to outline my grant idea. By the time I returned home, I had the whole grant mentally laid out, and I was prepared to get started writing on it. And, in the end, the grant was funded and has profoundly influenced my research direction and my career choices.

I don't know, who would have thought something like that would come out of a short training trip?

And of course, lots of other short training trips end up being nothing more than short training trips.

This sense of possibility is always with me when I prepare to go to another conference or do something new. Who knows what unexpected thing might happen that'll change everything from here on out? Who knows what conversation I'll have that'll spark a new idea for a collaboration or an article? Who knows what brand new person I'll meet who will actually end up becoming a really important person in my life? It's all so unpredictable.