By Samantha Berkhead
Associate Editor
Virtually anyone who has stepped foot on St. Bonaventure’s campus will wax poetic about the “Bona Bubble” — a figurative entity insulating the university’s students, faculty and staff from the outside world.
Even a year ago, I had little intention of leaving this distinctive place. There was so much I wanted to do here. I wanted to act more. I wanted to become the BV’s managing editor and later its editor-in-chief. I wanted to take more classes with my favorite professors. I wanted to live in a townhouse with a few of my best friends.
Since then, I’ve realized that these kinds of desires are things the masses aspire toward to quell the sense that their lives are a never ending series of going through the motions and sticking to the status quo.
I still have a little less than two months left before I return home from Northern Ireland. I’ll be spending the holidays in a series of ever more foreign locales — Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Prague and Berlin. I’ll be in Florence for Christmas and Venice for New Year’s.
I’m excited; seeing these places is literally all I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid. I should be terrified of traveling alone for three weeks, but for some reason it isn’t really bothering me.
There are universal truths one finds while traveling that can’t truly be realized by someone who stays in the same place mentally and physically.
I’ve come to understand that home is wherever I lay my head at night, and that freedom is the product of refusing to settle on the safe way through life.
Happiness doesn’t come from money, status or material possessions. It emanates from the open road, and the kindness of strangers, and the beauty of the world we live in.
Lastly, education is more than a transcript and a fancy degree.
I guess that’s what I’d say whenever asked about what I learned while studying abroad.
