Away we go

Yesterday only cemented what I want to do with my life.

My college visit went really well, even if it kind of didn't. It still did. Let me explain.

I've been trying to find direction in my life for quite some time, oh ten years or so. This year marks the year that most of my high school classmates are graduating from college. Where am I? Most certainly not among the sea of caps and gowns. I'm in my parents basement. Literally.

So this year, instead of feeling more motivated than ever, I was just feeling much more discouraged. Where did I go wrong? Well, that's a story for another day.

Fast forward to today, and what I hope becomes the start of something very different. I've been working at this, struggling to find direction and through all the work I've put in to it, I think I've finally found a dream to follow. A dream I never knew it would be possible to follow.

My whole life I prayed that I would want to focus my ambition (yes, it's in there somewhere!) on something that would make me wealthy enough to one day work with horses, or provide me the ability to own horses. It even became a secret obsession as I measured potential mates by the same standard. ("Would we be able to afford a horse on his income?") Sure, I would have just worked with horses directly, but my family knew nothing about the culture, and didn't have the funds to immerse me in it either when I was younger. So I held on to the hope that someday, I would be wealthy enough (financially stable enough) to immerse myself, but I had to find some sort of career that could get me there.

So still spending years of being unsure, and uncomfortable with every potential option I had before me, I had yet to make a decision. I didn't think I could be good enough at anything because I simply didn't have passion for anything else. And now, at twenty-two years old, I would surely look like a fool and never have the experience behind me of someone the same age who was put on a horse when they were six.

But it was one day during the summer that I was driving around Kansas City and it struck me. I had paused in front of the Kansas City Life Insurance building, it's a nice building, columns, stone lions out front, wide steps. A very grand looking building. Now, it's no Sears Tower or other outlandish architectural marvel, just a nice building. But someone designed that building. And the someone who designed the building probably wasn't doing it when he was six years old either, yet he made a functional and beautiful building. How did he go about doing that? Well, probably college.

And there was my answer. I needed to find a college that would teach me to be good with horses, then I could skip this passion-less business of finding a career to fund my wanted lifestyle. And so, after scanning a huge list of colleges that offered degrees (usually just associates, sometimes only certificates) I finally found one that offered a four year program, and it was only 2 1/2 hours away from my home.

THAT'S what I would do. I would go there and they would teach me everything I needed to know, so naturally I scheduled a campus tour, which was yesterday and I became ambitious and discouraged and ambitious all over again.