I carried a map of campus the first day of freshman year. I continued to carry that map for many weeks after. If it were just a map, then there would be no need to write about it. In retrospect, the map represented certainty and guidance, symbolic of my fixation at the time of “doing the right thing.”

As a 14-year-old, the concept of pursuing the “right thing” propelled me. That was my motivation as I stepped onto the Tracy High campus each day, armed with my map, armed with the one thing I adored most: certainty.

I lost that certainty at the end of sophomore year.

The shift did not occur in a day. There was not some miraculous moment when I went home and tore up my map and exclaimed myself free of plans and certainties and rigid schedules. It occurred gradually. It occurred so gradually that not until this year—yes, senior year—that I allowed myself to purposely get lost while driving and explore the neighborhoods of Tracy, GPS tucked away and disabled.

I pinpoint this loss of certainty, and the loss of its entrapping rigidness, as the most positive change throughout all of high school. With this loss of certainty, I no longer planned my life in 10-minute intervals. I laugh now looking back at the schedules furiously scrawled in my freshman and sophomore year planners. I no longer had a set major for myself in mind, let alone a set career. I no longer walked so fast, as if I had to get somewhere.

And the world opened up.

I made new friends. I learned how to have better conversations, by taking the time to listen to people. I worried less, and I can proudly say that I no longer rerun all my worries thirty minutes before I fall asleep. I embraced spontaneity, a concept that was once foreign to me, and two months ago, even drove to Bethany Reservoir one day without much forethought.

I can go on and on about the pleasant surprises that have risen from untying myself with certainty and rigidness, from stopping to look at flowers to spending afternoons reading poetry in the park to regularly attending art exhibitions—all things which I had previously deemed too busy in a life dominated by tracking the seconds on a watch. (Note: I no longer wear a watch.)

Next year I will be going to a place where people walk so fast that even I cannot keep up sometimes. It is a city of busy professionals, but it also a city of gardens, of museums, of hidden bookshops and coffee shops. The city is New York; the school is Columbia University.

And I’m ready to get lost all over again.