I would like to begin this project with a quote by Ghandi:
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
It may a bit cliched, but I really love this quote and I truly want to aim to live by it. And what better opportunity than the new year of 2012? Now, before anything else, I don't want to be accused of perpetuating the overly-simplified view that the Mayan calendar predicted that time would simply stop on December 21, 2012. I don't actually believe that they world is going to end in 2012 and (to my understanding of it), neither did the Mayans. That said, I thought that this would be a fun project and give me an interesting way to live like I were dying when I still (God-willing) have many healthy and happy years ahead of me!
Regardless of any cosmic shifts or universal apocalypses, this year will be an exciting year with a lot of (hopefully) really exciting changes for me! I will graduate from college in April with degrees in International Affairs and Italian and (again, hopefully) be off to bigger and better, wonderful things! It marks an ending for me of four years that I have loved living in Tallahassee and I will be parting ways with a group of amazing individuals who have become a second family to me. My main goal is to live abroad and I hope that sometime in the next few months that I will have a plan to speak of that has me landing either in Italy or Asia for at least the next few years of my life (or maybe Washington D.C.!). A new job, a new city and new opportunities are certainly in my future regardless and I look forward to tracking my journey on this blog.
In addition to that, I want this blog to be something of a dynamic, living, breathing bucket list. There are some things that I want to check off my list before I finish my life as a college student and, in addition to that, some general life things that I have just always wanted to experience. Some of these things are small things: hiking on a trail that is near my house, a night of intense star gazing. Some of them are larger: write a book, travel to South Korea, go sky-diving. Some things will just be up to chance/fate (whichever you prefer): make new friends? write a successful blog? a possible love story? I have no intention of finishing everything on my list, but my goal is to hit one item on the list every week (or maybe every two weeks) and to set smaller goals as check points for the larger goals. You may get a bit of my life philosophy along the way. You may not agree with everything or even anything that I say and that's okay (Feel free to let me know how you feel! Diversity makes the world beautiful!), but I appreciate you coming along on this ride with me.
I'm ready to go, ready to live fearlessly! I think that fear holds us back from so many things that we want to accomplish and I don't want to be governed by it anymore! I want to live fearlessly and reach for opportunities, without fear of failure or wasting time on something "too crazy." After all, if you were going to die tomorrow, would you live any other way?
Here's the beginning of my list (a work in progress, like me!):
-Hike the trails near my house
-Travel to South Korea
-Intense Star-Gazing
-Spend time meditating
-Learn Spanish
-Learn to play the guitar
-Sky-Diving
-Write a book
-Work on the World's Coffee Table Book (an idea of mine, I will explain this later)
-Soak up beauty for a whole afternoon
-Love more deeply and completely
-Make new friends, extra points if they are from different cultures
