#lab rotations

I switched labs, as we do during first year rotations.  Suddenly, I’m less stressed, more creative, enjoying life.  It’s amazing what a difference the lab culture makes, and how much my personal sense of self-worth is influenced by my surroundings.  

I wonder how much my choices based on these trends will influence my career, but then again - it reminds me of a conversation I had with an old coworker and friend about potential.  Both of us had looked back on our experiences in high school, in undergrad, and then at the company we both worked for.  We wondered if we’d tried harder or done more, if we’d be in different places (he applying to medical school and I to graduate school).  There were so many things that could have been, and yet, we did what we did.  It could be argued that our potential of the past was where we were now, because we tried to the extend that we did and made of what we had what we could at the time.  In a way, we are as good or as bad as was always possible, because that is what occurred.  Potential ends as events recede into the past.  There is no such thing as a could have from a different time.

In a similar way, I wonder at what my future holds or how my current thoughts will shape it, but it is less of what will happen instead of or because of and more, in general, what will merely be.  We don’t have the ability to dissect every aspect of our lives and truly know the causes and effects of every happening; we see only the large impacts and, to be honest, what we really want to see.  It never ceases to amaze me how much differing narratives can change our interpretations of events.  So much of how we see the world has very little to do with what actually happens.