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Education of a wandering girl

I want to wander.

This is a conveyor belt I'm on, despite what they say about free thinking and doing unusual things and stuff like that, and despite them saying that this college is pretty liberal-arts and stuff. It's not. It is, but it's not really. There's more...

Here's what I want. I want to take books and go travel the world and read a lot and experience different cultures. I want to eat foreign food and hear people string together strange syllables that flow together into my ear. I want to see strange sights. I want to meet people with eyes that have never seen my world, mouths that grew up making foreign sounds, ears unused to my bland accent, and skin touched by a different sun in a different sky. I want to be overcome with awe by the enormity and the crispness and the physical tangibility of the things that I see, so very real for the first time in my life.

I want to live in a different kind of house. I want to walk narrow, cobbled streets with buckets of flowers hanging from the street lamps and kids playing soccer here and there, shouting to each other in their sweet treble voices and their strange foreign words.

I want to spend my days educating myself. I want to read Dickens, Keats, Lewis, Tolkien, Shakespeare, Frankl, Hugo, Madsen, Alcott, Locke... I want to seek truth out of the best books. I want to study away my days and nights and evenings and revel in the beauty of the fact that truth exists, and it is connected, and it is right. There's truth to be found in America, for sure. There's truth to be found in Rexburg, at BYU-I. But I want to find the truth that lives in the marketplace in Morocco, and on the streets of Spain and the avenues of France and of Finland. I want to find the truth that lives in people's smiles and in their eyes. I want to hear the truth that lives in their music and feel it in their dancing. And I want to find the truth that lives in my own pumping blood. I want to discover it in new ways that I can't discover while I live here.

I want to find the truth that lives in the inky-black shapes of letters on white pages, and in the smell of a well-loved book. I want to find the truth that lives in archaic words and sentences structured with such complexity that it takes a serious mental effort to read and make sense of them.

It all just tastes so good to me.
I crave new experiences and exponential growth and sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings I've never had before. (Is that so much to ask?)


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