A Stone Thrown in the Air

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ambition in both a UK and US interpretation. The UK version is stated as: “the strong desire to achieve something” whereas the US version is: “a strong desire for success, achievement, power or wealth.” This dual interpretation got me thinking about where our sense of ambition comes from. Is ambition embedded in culture through national values? Or does it originate from our families and communities? Alternatively, perhaps ambition is something personal – inspired by key moments in our lives and our interpretation of them. I was thinking of this when I was back in my hometown of Kinderhook, New York recently. Passing by my old high school numerous times, I remembered sitting in class dreaming of a future far from our little hamlet of 1,000 people. My ambition was to leave my town and travel the world but at that point I had no idea how to do this and where life would lead me.?

My grandmother left her hometown in the Black Forest of Germany when she was eight years old. Scraping by to feed his family by working on a rented farm, my great-grandfather had the ambition to run a farm of is own. He took up the opportunity to run a dairy farm in the far reaches of Western New York state; eventually purchasing his own farm. He left months before the rest of the family to get a head start and my grandmother often recounted her earliest memories of taking the massive voyage to the US alone with her mother and two young brothers on a ship. In advanced age with Alzheimer’s, she continually repeated the story of how she accidentally locked herself and her baby brothers in the cabin when her mother went out to fetch something and how panicked her mother was when she finally managed to unlock it. For her and her mother, the voyage was filled with stress and fear; the fear of arriving somewhere without knowing the language, culture, or customs; the fear of being an outsider far from home. Although her mother may have had ambitions of returning to Germany, gradually the idea that Germany was ‘home’ faded and the USA became home for many generations after.?

When I was eight years old my grandmother visited her hometown in Germany. There she met my second cousin, Heidi, who was nine years old at the time. Heidi wanted to learn English and my grandmother thought that it would be a great idea to put us in touch so that she could gradually improve her English through writing and responding to letters from her American cousin. What started as a simple pen-pal relationship evolved into an enduring friendship. Heidi's letters opened a window into her life and fostered in me a deep understanding that there was an entire world outside of the United States. Thus, I knew from an early age that I wanted to explore beyond the confines of the US and live a life beyond that which had been set up by my great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and all those before them seeking the ‘American Dream.’ My ambition stemmed not from a wish to become wealthy or powerful – it came from a deep curiosity to understand and explore all that the world has to offer.

According to the Stoics, success is defined by the process and not the outcome. Marcus Aurelius explains that seeking success through achievement is like “a stone thrown in the air - it?is none the worse for falling down and none the better for going up.” A higher education is often thought of a means to ‘getting a job,’ and as such it is our current federal policy to foster ‘job ready graduates.’ Getting a job is only one part of a life journey. As we celebrate another cycle of the academic year ending – it is my greatest hope that our graduates can go out into the world with a voracious curiosity and a life-long ambition to understand and explore all that the world has to offer.?