A weird and kind of staggering thought that occurred to me while I was sitting in business class two weeks ago today, about to fly to Switzerland for an arbitration hearing: if I hadn't randomly decided, at age fifteen, that my high school's German exchange program sounded pretty cool and hey, I should start taking German, my life would look nothing like it does.
Maybe 'nothing' is strong. It's entirely possible that I still would have gotten hooked on the idea of Pomona. It's rather unlikely that I wouldn't have still been friends with Katie, and so maybe I still would have ended up living in New York with her and Ana and Diana after college. But I certainly wouldn't have studied abroad in Freiburg, wouldn't have filled Cleary's need for a German speaker, wouldn't have been sitting on that plane at that moment two weeks ago. And that was a crazy thing to think—much as we can't have any idea what it was exactly that we did that will lead us to where we are in life—that I could say with so much certainty that, if I hadn't started taking German as a fifteen-year-old, I wouldn't have arrived at that particular point.
Incidentally, it is also pretty staggering to think that, eight years ago, I could not speak a word of German.
More about this after I talk to my boss today, but I very well may be moving to Frankfurt within the next few months. Big things are afoot!
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