2018 / 2019 Project - @22

A couple of weeks back I was running Audio / Visual work for the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri during their major meeting just before Thanksgiving and they brought up a guest speaker who brought up a topic that sparked a thought. She asked a simple question, one that I'll repeat here now:

"At 22, did you know what you wanted to do with the rest of your life? And if you did, are you still doing that today?"

And it made me think that at 22 the world as a whole expects someone to be a fully formed adult, ready to take on the world. Which is incredibly unfair, but it has been the practice for so long that people don't really question it. Looking at it:

1. At 18, you're done with school... something you've likely done since you were 5 years old. You can't drink yet, you might be able to smoke, but you really don't know what you're going to do with your life. But hey, you can vote at this point.
2. Between 18-22 you could go to College and at some point in the middle become legally able to do the above things but you might put yourself into debt, succeed or fail when you go to college.
3. Then at 25, you can rent a car and get a reduced rate on insurance.

Now obviously these are all high level comments, but it's a wide spread of what's expected of you and what you can do based off of an arbitrary number that someone thought was reasonable.

So that brings me to my point. At 22 would it have been helpful for you to know that at 28, at 32, at 36, or even at 50 or older that it's okay not to know what you want to do with your life. It's okay to have failed, struggled, or succeeded but at the end of the day IT IS YOUR LIFE and you're the only one who knows how to live it.

So I decided I was going to start an interview series, audio at first, where I find out what people went through in their life to help maybe guide and encourage others to realize that there is no bar to rise to other than the one we make for ourselves. Stop and enjoy life because you don't get another time around, and take risks if they seem worthwhile for you.

I'll keep updating with the progress of the project, but at this point I've already started playing with the tech and have taken the first steps into building my interview question list and recording capabilities. *crosses fingers* Let's see what this does.