<Originally Published October, 2011>
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
So
begins the motivational book Oh, The Places You’ll Go by the esteemed Dr.
Seuss. The book was first published in 1990, years after my own graduation from
high school, but if someone had given it to me, I would have scoffed. Why
would anyone want to go explore that big scary world when everything I
wanted/needed was right here in my small Ohio town? I planned to live in the
same area–possibly the same house–where I had grown up and raise a whole passel
of children who would wear the same unflattering Orange and Black school colors
and then they’d grow up and have babies of their own and live right next door
to me. In a word, I was wanderlust-less. So even if Oh, The Places You’ll Go
had been available, its encouragement to go off and see the world would have
been wasted on me.
