Day one of pilot training (Undergraduate Pilot Training or UPT as we called it in the Air Force) held many formative, memorable, and entertaining moments for me. I looked around at engineers, airline pilots, and former fighter navigators and realized for the first time I was not the only one ‘born for this’.

We all spend hours on our resumes trying to convince an HR department or admissions committee that the only mistake we’ve made is not applying sooner! That we’ve only learned through the sweet taste of victory, and excellence is our default state of being. Go us! However, the truth about my highlights is that each of them punctuates some failure or shortcoming that occurred somewhere between the lines.

The future is serious business, but so are immediate actions and self-care. Sometimes we can get so lost looking at all the fig branches, that we forget that the most important parts of the tree are beneath us; the roots and the soil they rest in.