It was not exactly a banner month for learning.

There were a few interesting items — the NASA movie posters, the Brigham Young University beard policy, some stuff about farts.

There was some stuff I liked, and some stuff I didn’t.

But, looking back at the few meaningful exercises in bluggery, it seemed like if February was about exploring the world around me, March involved a lot of exploration of the world within.

The other night (technically, this was in April, but it’s my blergh, so screw off), I ran into a fellow UPer who’s going to Europe for six weeks. 

I convinced her that blojjering was a worthwhile endeavor — but I found myself thinking about that conversation a lot afterwards.  She writes:

27 was to be THE year!!  The year that everything came together and my life would finally make sense. 

And then, of course, the opposite.

Hey, I thought.  I remember that!  And I remember how great it felt to have the realization that lack of direction is just another word for freedom.  And I remember why it’s important to explore within.

That conversation at Union Pub helped me realize that my friend’s epiphany about how to handle moments of transition is the same one that has guided my (considerably less continental) experiment here.  And while I now want to backpack Europe (or go back to Belize) more than ever, I’ve started to remember that the point of exploring the world is that it helps you learn about yourself.

I spent a lot of this month feeling like I’m in transition — personally, professionally, in whatever spiritual/physical dimension the changing of seasons gets you.  Maybe that’s where my mortality panic came from.

But as April begins, I’m feeling a lot better.  And I think it’s because I learned something after all.

I think I spend way too much time and energy looking outward for cues.  That’s probably why I’m terrible at making decisions.  I don’t just look to the people I’m close to.  I look to casual acquaintances, people I don’t even talk to anymore but who still live in my head, people I’ll never meet but whose reactions I imagine.

But in March, I learned:

The things I learn about myself are really, really important.

That’s where the real stuff is.  Not in the faces of the people I meet or the echo chamber of my mind.  And, while I learned in February that exploration makes me happy, this month I’ve come to realize that exploring within is important to staying happy.

Now, this all sounds like a lot of bullshit, even to me.  But I am applying this learning.  I’m making decisions — some actually big (like what to do with my career) and some only big in my head (like how to rearrange my living room) — based on what I find within myself.  And maybe that’s why I’m way more excited about these decisions — and about my life — than I’ve been in a long time.

Not bad for kind of a squishy moral.

-andy