Plants

When Condoleezza Rice spoke at BYU last year, she told us that the best way to figure out what we want to do in life is to find our passion. She told us she had played the piano her whole life, thinking it was the thing that would bring her the most happiness. In the last year of her college career, she stumbled upon a required political science class and never went back. She found what she was passionate about. Eventually she got to play a duet with Yo Yo Ma, not because she was a piano performance major but because she was Secretary of State.

I didn't understand this for awhile. I didn't know how one went about "finding their passion." And I definitely didn't (and still don't) have enough life experience to understand what that actually means. But I did know what kinds of things made me excited. I loved explaining matrices and eigenvectors and trigonometry. But the feeling was not exactly fulfilling in the way that I wanted it to be. Eventually, I recognized my interest with the scenery around me. There's something indescribable about climbing to the top of Half Dome, sweaty and shaking, to see what there is at the top of a mountain.

Last fall I took a class called "Cultural History of Medicinal Plants." No, I'm not a witch doctor. Not yet. But I want to learn all the things that witch doctors know. I want to be able to walk down the street and name trees and plants by their actual names and know what their uses are. The other night I found a few books at the library on plants in Tonga and surprised myself at how excited I was. I get to go to a tropical island to learn about plants. Nobody gets to (or maybe wants to) do that. I have found something I'm passionate about.