My daughter Brittany just left home for a fantastic adventure in South Korea (branewbusan.blogspot.com). She has met her first dog there, which is nice because Brittany has always liked animals. For a long time, during college, she threatened to take one of the family's pets, a black lab named Buda. Always, however, she generously allowed Buda to remain with us.
Which brings up my primary point here, and that is Brittany goes half-way around the world while Buda stays.
Buda, however, home-loving as she may be, has a reputation for roaming, once venturing off into the woods on a rainy day in the mountains, getting lost, traversing a four-lane highway and several other roads, and managing to wind up inside a fenced yard of a lady who thought she was a bear cub curled up under a holly bush by her front door. We got her back, and today she sticks close at hand wherever we go, usually.
Brittany's SK adventure follows on her many travels throughout the U.S. and other companies with her family. On one of these trips, she survived three weeks in a mini-van with all of us (hey, we survived too, miraculously enough) and, in this endurance contest, she proved that she could handle adversity with aplomb and rancor without imploding, as those around her did just that. I cannot think of a time when she got ruffled on that trip, while everyone else did. If I am wrong, there are four people who can remind me of where my memory is failing here.
I cannot think of a better way to launch your career and adult adult life than venturing off into another country and another culture. You shape yourself in so many ways during those first few months when college life ends and the rest begins. Of course, college itself shapes you, often determining how you will spend the rest of your life and with whom you will share it.
My adventure after college was moving to Augusta, Georgia, and working as a reporter on the daily newspaper there. For me, there were never any thoughts of moving to another country, although later on in my early newspaper years, New York called out to me. But I resisted, and never really went much beyond any of the various newsrooms I worked in. There were moments, of course, of fantasizing about being a foreign correspondent. By the time I became a wire editor, though, that fantasy became somewhat real, if only in a vicarious way, reading and editing stories about international events, rather than being there, seeing what was happening and writing about it.
But life's starts are life's starts. And while you do get second changes at life's starts, if you seize the right ones in the right way, there is nothing quite like being 22 or 23 years old and making you own way, through adventure, out into the world.
I admire Brittany for that, just as I admire Dorothy for her adventure in Taiwan and just as I appreciate Aimee for her well-grounded start with her job -- and career -- in Atlanta.
Adventure is where you find it, and you really do not have to travel half-way around the world to experience everything you want in life. It's OK to do that, seeing other countries and living there. Whatever path you choose, the important thing is to finding it, moving down it and creating your future.
That's what happens, anyway, and it is best to be the conductor of your life, rather than just going along for the train ride. I'm glad my wonderful girls chose to be conductors.
OK, I end my first blog posting with a bit of philosophical meanderings. Such is the roadway of life.
Posts
