GO WITH WHAT GOT YOU THERE

I've been home about a week now, and when I say I have loved every second I really mean it. This is my place, my town, my valley, my home. I got my first blog comment tonight, and while it was exciting it was kind of hard at the same time. While you can all read it, I just wanted to mention it briefly.

The comment was anonymous, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that it came from a friend in CA (I'm smart like that). For those of you random passersby that don't know, I spent the last four years of my life at Pepperdine in CA, and spent some time in Florence, Italy, as well. While they were probably the four most challenging years of my life for a variety of reasons, I am so thankful I got to live out the experiences I did, meet the people I met, and get the education that I got. Fun fact of the day - that education is currently worth more than my family's house; although my lack of a job might tell you otherwise (oh heeeey, economy).

Over my last couple months in CA, I had a ridiculous amount of conversations about where life was headed, and a lot of the people I talked to had one thing to say... "I don't know what's going to happen, but I don't want to go home." I completely understand that perspective, and definitely believe it holds merit. College was a blast. But when it came down to it for me, all I wanted was home. That's no knock on CA (well, maybe a little), and certainly not on all my friends there, but it's what I needed.

When you're a kid you always hear about how home is where the heart is. Those that know me well know that I hate cliché, but it is what it is (I say that a lot, cliché or not, but mostly because it's true). While I was in CA that's where my heart was, no doubt. I had a blast and wouldn't change a whole lot of anything that happened there. But while I was there, my pulse came from what I have here. And it goes beyond just a person or people - it's a community. It's irreplaceable, just like every individual community is. Community is amazing; and I fully believe it's what keeps us going, day to day, week to week, trial to trial. When things hit the fan for me last summer, my brother and one of my best friends on my doorstep in CA a couple days later without me even asking. In no way is that me saying that the community I have in CA is inadequate in some way; it's just how amazing the community I have here is. It's why I'm home. It's what got me to CA in the first place. Without this community, I would have settled here and never taken the risk of challenging myself elsewhere to begin with. I love California, this is just where I need to be right now.

I guess this kind of just bumbled along and ended up much longer than intended, and I would like to clarify that in no way am I suddenly a proponent of complacency and settling for something well known and comfortable rather than taking risks. Don't ever stop challenging yourself and the status quo. But when you get somewhere that was worth going, stop and take a second to realize how the hell you got to where you did, and recognize how valuable whatever it was that got you there still is.