I probably just summed up my entire article for you before you even read it. Need to stop doing that. Anyways, as I said earlier, I'm tired, so I hope you enjoy this when it goes up.
Who needs to be professional?
Leaving Your Hometown by Mackinley Clevinger, January 24, 2016
Humanity may be capable of moving as one when the need comes along, but the level of variation and uniqueness one can find in exploring the cultural sub-sets of a single part of one country is astounding. There are a seemingly infinite number of ways to live, to think, to view the world we all live in, or to do the things that seem incredibly simple or integral to our lives; and each of these things will mean something different to the individual people living in the hundreds of thousands of communities and cultures spread across our Earth.
There was a time when these communities and the cultures they instilled in their youth were all that the young would know as they grew, and when they became old enough they would settle down and teach the same to their young. Generation after generation taught the same and expected to do the same as their teachers before them. Vast distances lay between neighboring towns, rendering any ability to travel safely difficult and dangerous enough for it to be considered impossible by most. As such, each community’s culture and system of ideas weren’t able to cross over with one another, and each community kept to itself and stayed to the same path it had walked for years.
Our individual lives follow a pattern that integrates itself into this changing society as we grow. In our childhood we are kept to our families and protected from society, taught the basics we need to know for our survival and for us to one-day join into a community. As we age, we slowly begin to enter the larger world bit-by-bit, retreating back into the safe haven of our families after each excursion and staying out for longer with each passing foray.
The final step is for us to leave our homes once and for all, brave the unknown of the wider world, and learn about the wide range of cultures and ideologies that exist both near and far to the homes we’ve known our whole lives. This takes many forms in our lives, from going to university to striking out on your own to seek your fortune.
This is an important aspect of our lives that serves to educate us and widen the horizons of our minds. Without it, our growth is stunted and restricted to the collected wisdom of those who raised us and surrounded us in our youth. Foreign ideas will never enter the mix, cultural differences never understood, and a potential dependent on meeting aspects of life outside of our comfort zones will never be reached.
There are an infinite number of ways for us to live our lives, and without being shown anything more than the paths found by the people who nurtured and raised us, we are cut off from entire worlds that could serve to give our lives meaning. Without at the very least browsing what life could be like, how can we ever know that what we are doing is what we want most out of our brief time on this Earth?
It is absolutely vital that every person be given or take the opportunity to leave their hometowns and explore this huge, diverse world of ours. They need to meet new people who think differently than they and their families do to aid the development of free thought and an understanding of others. They need to know that there exist a multitude of different paths to follow in their life, and they can choose any path they want instead of the one they’ve been set on by the nature of their upbringing. They need to know that there is a bigger world that exists outside of the cozy haven that they’ve spent their entire lives in, and that maybe that’s where they belong.
By entering a larger world different than the one we came from, we change. We meet conflicting ideas that alter the way we think, coming to accept that either we were wrong before or that conflicting understandings of our world is a natural aspect of being two members of the human race. We discover different ways to live our lives instead of the careers that might’ve been expected of us, and that we aren’t bound to walk only one path.
Leaving our hometowns to place ourselves where we choose in a wider world gives us freedom. Freedom to develop ourselves however we wish without the watching eye over our shoulder that once ensured our safety and now would limit our potential. This freedom lets us become who we want to be, as opposed to who we were expected to be by our community and by ourselves.
Achieving this level of autonomy in our lives is nigh impossible if we don’t move away from our childhood homes, no matter how difficult that departure may be. Being surrounded by culture that is foreign to us, every day an opportunity to discover something new that may well drive us to the greatness that we admire in others is something worth the pain of leaving behind the warmth and safety of your hometown for the risk and reward of building your life and legacy for yourself.
While it’s become a part of the climate in our modern society for the young man or woman coming of age to depart from their family home and travel the world, fulfilling and finding their destiny until the day they root themselves down and become the progenitor of the next generation to adventure out into a mysterious world to find their own glory, so too is it an oft case to find communities whose children still remain rooted and never learn, firsthand, of all that the world has to offer, and become part of a cycle that is exempt from the developments of the wider world.
It is against this way of life, bereft of the full range of experiences that life has to offer, that I say to anyone considering their future: Leave your hometown. Get out of there and live your life to the fullest, and if you find that what you truly want more than anything is to return to where you came from, then you’ll have returned knowing more than you did before. There’s a wide and varied world out there for anyone willing to take advantage of it, so go out there and have a look for yourself, decide what your place in this world is and what you can do to it that makes you the happiest. You won’t regret it.