I considered that it is difficult to predict what would happen in those ten years of my life. I speculated that it would be likely that I would want to buy a house during that time and probably get married and have children. While that is all reasonable, it would add complications to my life. The added financial burdens of a mortgage and a wife and children, not to mention the social implications and 18-year responsibilities, would make it even more difficult for me to complete, within the upcoming decades, my original goal of taking a few years to bicycle around the world.
I felt torn. My original idea of beginning world cycling after my Peace Corps service seemed perfect in many ways, yet impossible financially. The best alternative in its most likely scenario seemed even worse. The practical solution seemed to be to proceed with the MD/PhD plan and hope that events would somehow conspire to make things work well for me. After all, the prospect of me making a decision to make things work well for me and to take responsibility for directing events in my world seemed to me at the time to be nothing more than taking a crazy risk. However, I vaguely recognized that, if I accepted the practical solution, then that would be tantamount to rejecting my vision because circumstances seemed to make it impossible. I questioned why I would have a vision that I was not allowed to fulfill.