Back in high school, you attended classes without much appreciation of your reasons for education.
You complied with scholastic protocol for all teenagers. For the most part, you carried your books to school, read your assignments, cheered at athletic games, joined a few clubs, and finally, graduated from your course work in a blinding flash.
After hearing some teacher rain praises down upon you as you sat wearing your graduation cap, moments later, you walked across the stage for your diploma.
Now what?
Ironically, most American schools today fail to teach courses in healthy relationships, how to maintain successful marriages and child rearing, how to find work and how to navigate the competitive edges of living.
For 20 percent of 18 year olds, college creates a “raison d’etra” or a “reason for living” to pursue higher learning that may or may not allow a student a better job and greater chances of success. If you enjoy such a path, college opens you up to critical thinking, greater understanding and a more compelling path toward life. It broadens you, expands your intellect and offers you more breadth.
Philosophy, sociology, physics, biology, calculus, literature and history offer your thriving mind new ideas to ponder. Shakespeare may inspire. Hawkins may confound. Camus may stimulate. Muir carries you into the spiritual realm. Emerson, well, he thrives in your heart of hearts.
If you can make the college grade, it may be your launching pad toward a fulfilling life.
For anyone not able to spring off that intellectual diving board with a college career, other options open to you in various areas. If you follow most high school graduates, you pretty much apply for jobs and stumble into something. That “something job” rarely fulfills you or resembles you.
One of my friends screwed around in high school. He barely graduated. I tried to talk with him in his junior year, “Jack, you’re screwing around with poor grades, but you race toward 18 when life no longer offers free house, free food, free clothes, free shower, free tooth brush, free TV, free computer, free transport, free medical, free insurance and mother cooks dinner.”
He didn’t listen. He graduated, but couldn’t enter a university. He squeaked into junior college, but promptly flunked out. He grabbed a roofing job that nearly busted him in half. Later, he took a job at a 24 Hour Fitness center at $8.00 an hour on the night shift where he languished for five years. He remained broke, bored and living day to day with no aspirations. No vacations and no girlfriends look for a guy making such pathetic wages. Mind you, Jack is very intelligent, but “life” doesn’t care how smart you are if you’re lazy and unmotivated.
Some girlfriend advised him about a pharmacy tech job at $11.00 an hour. He took it, hates his boss and plows through 40 to 50 hours a week filling prescriptions to medicated and addicted patients, and other suffering humans. He graduated to a decent wage, but must deal with not pursuing his life on his terms and a miserable two weeks vacation annually. He’s trapped and he’s set himself up for a very average life.
So many American twenty-something’s possess so much talent and possibilities, but they squander their young lives in confusion.
Please understand this fact: you either charge into life with a sharp blade or life will stab you in the guts with a dull blade day in and day out.
You either take charge by your decisions, your clarity and your choices—or life cuts you down slowly, day by day, cut by cut until you emotionally bleed into a lump of disappointment. That’s why so many suffer a mid-life crisis.
Solution:
Search for and discover your highest and best through education. Give “life” your best through your actions. Elevate your imagination to explore your possibilities. Hang with successful friends. Think, act and pursue your highest vibrational energies. Read books on how to live a successful life. When you do, the “universe” conspires with you. People support you. Life sharpens your blade for you. Ultimately, you charge into life with clarity and purpose enough to conquer and command your destiny.
Read more posts by Frosty Wooldridge here. Frosty is a blogger for JenningsWire.
The online feature magazine, JenningsWire.com, is created by National PR Firm, Annie Jennings PR that specializes in providing book promotion services to self-published and traditionally published authors. Annie Jennings PR books authors, speakers and experts on major high impact radio talk interview shows, on local, regionally syndicated and national TV shows and on influential online media outlets and in prestigious print magazines and newspapers across the country.
