Sometimes you have to go to know you should have gone
— JD Andrews

Another day of living–of truly living, and I cannot continue to express the happiness and joy that comes with the liberating freedoms of where I am currently in life. In spite, of the sadness of the passing of my grandfather the night before, as well as my friend Jenna Schultz who died just several days before her birthday–she was in her young 30s, it has been an emotional time apart from those that I miss dearly. But, I am also reminded that the circle of life continues as my younger sister is just beginning her life with her husband Justin, and with this thought I am happy to see that the hope I carry is one that we all share in the highs and lows that life throws at us. I urge you to take this time to evaluate your life, since it often is so short, and examine that which is tugging at you towards a more promising future. A quote, from Henry Rollins, that I stumbled upon put much of the importance of travel into perspective and I thought I would leave today’s entry with it, “I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Dehli, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about, I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people–Americans and Europeans–come back and go, ‘ohhhhh.” And the lightbulb goes on.”