The Nonlinearity of Life

Submitted for UChicago’s 2025-26 Study Abroad writing contest.

First Place winner ;)

Title and explanation: The Nonlinearity of Life explores the tension between the life I thought I should lead and the one I discovered was possible. Through my experience studying abroad, the essay reflects how immersing in a slower, more intentional way of living challenges my rigidity about the daunting future. The experience ultimately reshaped how I now understand time, risk, and what life truly means.

I’ll never forget the first time I stepped out of the train station in Córdoba. I had been traveling for what felt like forever – especially for a first time traveler. With exhaustion getting to me and the adrenaline of having to force my mediocre Spanish in a new place, I tackled after several trains, and a hold up at customs. I somehow made it. Broken Spanish and no service on my phone. I had never been outside of the United States before. I didn’t yet understand that I wasn’t just arriving in a foreign place, I was stepping into a new way of being. The Google map came to life and I lugged my suitcase to the hotel. I made it.

It feels like I arrived years ago because I’ve experienced more in these past 6 weeks than I have in my whole life. Not just the travels, but the ways of life. Life here is slow, intentional, unapologetically slow. At first, I wanted to do everything but that. Three-hour dinners, lengthy conversations, no urgency to move onto something else. I would sit there restless as the waiter poured more drinks and my friends kept talking. In my head I was thinking about how late it was going to be when I showered and finally got into bed. I kept begging for an answer as to how this life, so different yet so simple could this be productive? How could this be a real way of living?

I didn’t understand how to sit still without feeling like I was falling behind.

Back home, I lived like I was racing against time. There was no “present,” only the fearful anticipation for the future. One day I blinked and suddenly I graduated high school.

I had a plan for everything. Literally. Every year, every milestone, every decision I made was calculated to lead me down the path I thought would fix it all. Joining Moot Court, trying the best majors for law school, creating the perfect law school to workforce timeline. I thought I was securing my future. But now I see I was just my own manager. Creating every nitpicking moment and analyzing its cost effectiveness. I was becoming someone I was supposed to be.

Here, things started to register differently. I would walk down the street and would see a man drinking coffee, only for me to see the same man at the same spot hours later, as I made my walk back home. The impression he gave me wasn’t just that he had the time to kill, but because they knew something I didn’t. The espresso was not going anywhere. The cafe was not going to grow legs and leave. The restaurants waited for you to be done. That man that drinks his espresso, understood that time is not meant to be wrestled with, it’s meant to be lived with. And there is a great level of courage needed to choose presence over productivity; connection over ambition; passion over regulation.

I began to see opportunities as something I could truly attain. They did not have to be years in the future nor proven to make a certain path in my life better. Life was finally nonlinear to me. Living in a new state or a new country, even, was totally possible. The crisp air of the English plains, or the warmth of Paris nights – it was no longer just a vision. I could make decisions and take risks without knowing what the future held, now I was alive in my decisions.

This feeling reached its apex when I went to Barcelona. It was a place I had dreamt about for years, tied to memories of my father and small pieces of myself I held onto from afar. When I finally walked off the metro and into the Camp Nou, I saw that it wasn’t the city that changed my thinking, but what I finally allowed myself to believe. For the first time, I saw a life I didn’t have to wait and admire, but one that I could truly make true. I could come here for soccer games regularly. I could take the metro. I could learn Catalan. This could be one of my many homes.

I could stay. I could create a life for myself. Even if it was temporary or unstable. Teaching English, working in a cafe, living a life I didn’t meticulously plan. I finally felt free.

Then, last week, a friend of mine took his life. We weren’t especially close, but he left an imprint on my life. He was authentically kind, empathetic in a way that made people feel seen. He encouraged me to always be better, try harder, dig deeper, not be so consumed by what I thought I had to be.

His loss broke me. It broke me not only because he was lost to the world at such an early age, but also because his passing forced me to confront something I had been avoiding: that life is fragile and short, and time is not something that stands still and waits.

For my whole life I thought I would create the time for myself to truly live later. There would be time to try new things and take risks while everything else was secure. There would be time to be the person I finally could unapologetically be. When would that time be? How many years did I have to live through to finally feel real?

But now I see.

There is no guarantee of a “later.”

I have now. And now is enough. It is more than enough.

I don’t have to live one life. I can take risks and switch up my jobs. I can choose randomness. Not as something to have fear of, but of something to be worth living for. I can fall and I can get back up.

Because that’s what life gives you. Chances to try again. You can live, again and again.

Studying abroad has given me more than a new place, it has given me a new perspective. Like the man drinking his coffee all afternoon: life can be what you make of it. The opportunity to do so is not something that falls into your lap at the right time, it is something of a disposition, an attitude toward it. One can rush a coffee, or enjoy it sip by sip, so much so that it takes hours. But the coffee owner will not tell you how to drink your coffee – much like life does not comewith an instruction manual. The experiences I’ve made while in Spain have taught me how to drink my coffee, how to lead my life – in a different way.

The pieces don’t have to fit it neatly and the plan doesn’t have to make sense all the way through. In short, there’s no correct way to live. After all, we only get one life. But it is also true that the more experiences one opens oneself to, the more ways of living become knowable, accessible. I thought life could only be followed one way, the linear one I myopically thought was right. It is through Córdoba, and Spain more broadly, that I’ve discovered other ways are possible and I am endlessly grateful for it.