My Life, Your Lives, and the Destination Thereof

Hoorah! My family is going to Tennessee for about ten whole days! We plan to spend time in Nashville, Chattanooga, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Asheville, North Carolina (to see the Biltmore house!). We haven't had a family vacation in quite a few years, so this is going to be extra exciting!
I plan to take the Humanities CLEP test before we leave for Tennessee, yikes! I have all sorts of resources I can use to study, but I'm still a little worried. Prayers are appreciated!

So, how is school going girls? Speaking for myself, I can honestly say that I have become very easily distracted. Look at me now, writing a blog post when I planned to be studying musical theory…. At other times, doesn’t a sense of purposelessness kind of seize you? It’s an all-too-common feeling that “all of this is going nowhere and why on earth am I learning about logarithms when I could be out saving the world?” However, a little scene with Aaron yesterday clarified something for me.

He was going through that fearsome time of English when one draws diagrams of sentences. You know, separating the subject and predicate, the pronoun and the antecedent, all of that. At the time I was doing all of that, four years ago, I felt like it was so pointless, it wasn’t as if there were any big business execs sitting on fortieth floors of skyscrapers getting paid to diagram sentences! Nevertheless, I had to learn to do it. Aaron was espousing the self same feelings when something clicked in my head. It’s that time-worn axiom: it’s the journey, not the destination.

Looking back I can see so many things that made no sense if the point was to reach a worthwhile goal, but made all the sense in the world if the point was to simply ingrain certain principles into my head till they became second nature to me. The point was to learn the building blocks of sentences, not to be an expert sentence-diagrammer. And isn’t that true of life as well? Look at it all with a fresh eye for a moment, and think how we so often spend our time stumbling through every day as if we were searching for a moment that would be “the destination.” The point is, though, that there isn’t a stopping place. We should always be going “further up and further in,” looking for the next great thing. To be stagnant would be to give up the joy of living! So there should never be a moment that has nothing beyond it.

We should all have a vision, an idea of what is best and where we want to be going, but we’ve also got to learn to break it down into the baby steps. Knowledge of logarithms will help me pass the College Algebra CLEP, passing that test will put me closer to a college degree, that degree can take me farther in life than I would go if I didn’t have one. Step back, look at the big picture, and then concentrate on the baby steps, marching toward your goal but not forgetting that this moment is the culmination of your life. The moment you are living right now is what you have worked your entire life to reach! Don’t be afraid to plan for the future, don’t be too busy to stop and smell the roses.

Tata for Now,
Abby Rogers