There’s a Whole World Out There
Growing up, I don’t remember a lot of vacations like all the other kids seemed to get. I never went south of Florida, I never went west of the Mississippi, I had never gone more north than Washington D.C., and the furthest east I had ever been was the coast of South Carolina. The Academy has sent me halfway across the world – I’ve been all over, from Hong Kong to Hawaii, from Panama to Peru . . . I never made it over to Africa or Europe, but there’s plenty of time to visit those places in the future. . .
My point is – go out and experience something. There really is a whole world out there beyond our computer and tv screens. I know this sounds like some sort of cliché campaign to get the generations of today off their butts to go outside, but there really is something to the idea of just getting up and learning about the world outside of the one we’re limited to.
When we limit ourselves to what we know – then we are doing ourselves a terrible disservice.
Apply Yourself
My final days with my parents before I came to the Academy, they tried imparting as much of their wisdom to me as possible. My pop told me “No Ocean Too Vast.” I had no idea what he meant at the time, I figured it was just his way of trying to correlate his wisdom with the nautical theme of my school.
But now, with so many milestones out of the way: plebe year, eleven countries visited, the ordering of my class ring . . . I can’t help but think “No Ocean Too Vast.” I believe my class started out with some two-hundred and eighty-five people, and now we are well below the original number – under two-hundred of us remain. I have done things I never before thought myself capable of doing . . . When they asked me what I wanted inscribed on the inside of my class ring, I told them “No Ocean Too Vast.”
There should never be a reason why we limit ourselves. We never know what we’re capable of until we try.
The Millennial Objective
So why should Millennials care about “No Ocean Too Vast”? We definitely get the part where we apply ourselves no matter what. Millennials, I think, are pretty good at telling others to bugger off, that we can do whatever we want to do, so long as we set ourselves out to do it. The problem we have is that we often limit our knowledge to the world around us. We get complacent. We get into our comfort zones and never want to leave them. We want to stay with mama and pop. We want to hang out with our friends, we want to stay under the covers. There’s a whole world out there – and when we finally do realize that we need to come out from under our cozy covers . . . we’ll find ourselves fully capable of undertaking the vastness of it all.
favorited this one, bro