When you're lost and alone and you're sinking like a stone, carry on. Let the past be the sound of your feet upon the ground. Carry on

I have spent the past nearly ten years making decisions that few people understand and likely even fewer blindly chose to accept or embrace. From leaving high school early, my travels, getting married young, to leaving my young love in search of something I'm only beginning to understand : happiness.

I've "settled" a lot in my life. At times thinking I have found what would be the "best of what's around" (thank you Dave Matthews), thinking that I was never worthy of something more. Don't get me wrong the guy I did chose to marry at the ripe age of twenty-one is pretty phenomenal (in case you read this Bryon); I sincerely hope he has taken the past two years to honestly seek the happiness and fulfillment I know is out there somewhere. I've settled in other ways, for jobs I knew I was better than. For rooms I knew were way to small. And even sometimes for friends who couldn't reciprocate the support I offered them.

Driving to Arlington, strangely anxious to say my final goodbyes I received the news that I had been accepted into what I thought was my first choice graduate program and next big life choice : Tulane's Disaster Resilience and Leadership Academy. The news comes just as I was starting to accept and even look forward to my rejection. To my absolute freedom to follow the winds of happiness wherever they may blow. So now I sit, accutely more aware of my tendancies to leap without first looking, saddled with the choice for grad school, a decision that I fear I may look back on as "settling" yet again.

It truly is bittersweet when you are suddenly handed everything you wanted just to realize you may no longer want the same things. I must find a succinct, witty way to shorten that idea to the title of my first book. As my mother always said, I'm very good at diving in head first just to later back peddle out. This is not to say, Tulane may not be in the cards still. I suppose I just have a lot to figure out, which is of course the precise reason for the one way ticket. Just to clarify, I have no regrets, not one.