teeter-totter 20s

So I've found myself in several conversations with friends in the past few weeks discussing how much of our lives are in transition. Now, I know life is always changing on ya and that we're constantly adapting, but I feel like our 20s are particularly trying in this regard. We leave the certainty of college and the academic life for other things. Even Grad School has all sort of 'your future career/life' implications. You have to decide which direction you wanna go. For some people that choice is relatively easy but even then, you have to decide HOW you wanna go. The WHERE and WHAT are not nearly so difficult as the HOW and the WHY. And these questions are critical to functioning as an 'adult' in our society. Think about a typical conversation:
"Hi, nice to meet you. What do you do? How'd you get into that line of work?"
BAH! simple conversations have become mine fields. I feel like now, more than ever, we have to answer..."Dunno" or "Well, it just kinda fell into my lap"
We try and figure out where we're going and how we're gonna get there, but as is obvious, life changes those plans. We so often have to compromise the original plan for something that's more feasible. But then we still have to find a way to take this detour and build the road back to where we want to be (if we can figure out where that is).
The exciting part of all of this is the boundless opportunity in front of us. We can do anything...but I'm not sure that's as true as we once thought. Yes, you can do anything, as long as you can still find somewhere to live and someway to eat. We're building our careers and our lives.
But that's also scary because what's more important in building things than their foundation? You mess up your foundations...you're always gonna be standing on something shaky.
Ultimately you have to go with your gut and trust the foundation you've already built and hope that if you want, you have the wiggle room to make changes as you go along. Either way, there's no stopping the progression of time, but hey, then we're closer to our first-floor building 30s, right?