life layover

November 15, 2012 at 6:00 am · Filed under stories and tagged: clarity, life, Nebraska, Nebraska Cornhuskers, Wisconsin

< by Nate >

Everyone tells you how it is supposed to work.

You go to college. You graduate. You get a great job. You meet a girl. You get married. And you live happily ever after.

No one talks to you about moving to Nebraska.

Upon graduating, I began my nationwide search for a sports journalism job. With prospects in my home state of Wisconsin slim, I knew I’d be moving away.

Within a month of leaving college, I was driving through Iowa, on my way to the small town of Columbus, Neb., where I was to start my professional career as a sports writer.

Over the next three years, I learned a lot. From figuring out how to file a tax return, to learning that a small vibration actually meant the car needed a new tire, my lessons came just as often in life as they did in the newsroom.

Don’t get me wrong; I cut my teeth in front of the computer. You have to when you work for a rabid fan base, one that will call you every name in the book — my favorite was being condemned as being possessed by the devil — when you write columns against Nebraska athletics with a little too much truth in them.

But it was living in a state I had never visited until my move, living in a region so different from the countryside I grew up in, making friends, learning from mistakes, that shaped me.

Jesus spent 40 days in the desert, and while I don’t claim to have done anything remotely similar, I feel like my time living “The Good Life” (Nebraska’s state motto) formed me into the person I am today.

My path isn’t written in a textbook, and hasn’t gone as I’d planned. But I wouldn’t change a thing.

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