Best Advice

“If you want to be a geologist, be a geologist.”

I can’t recall when, exactly, my dad said this to me. Maybe I was in high school, but it could have been while I was in college. Or after. I’d like to think he said it at someone’s graduation, at a celebration, a place where the road forks, where journeys begin. Chances are it happened over a meal. That I cannot place the sentence in context or chronology underscores that it wasn’t intended to be advice but the kind of thing we say and hear and forget about every day.