YOU DIDN'T BUILD THIS:

Remember you are a pilgrim on this road. You are not meant to be a final product, so focus on your verbs more than your nouns: you write, you make, you teach, you serve. This will help you avoid chasing the title and the conversation-piece job, staying true to what you enjoy doing and what you excel at being. Know that once you climb one mountain, there is a higher one above you. Never cease to keep looking out and up, beyond yourself to all the people and places to whom you belong. For belonging is the most beautiful part of the journey, and they lie who tell you that you are your own. If I could rewrite Oh the Places You'll Go, I'd draw that little tyke with a handful of loved ones around him on his way. Chaucer and Dante told truer tales of pilgrimage. I'd also forego many of Theodor Geisel's words in favor of those T.S. Eliot wrote: "We shall not cease from exploration/ and the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/ and know the place for the first time."

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