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I was driving down University Drive on my way to Hollywood when a bulletin interrupted a radio call-in show: first they announced “a malfunction” aboard the space shuttle, and then an explosion. I felt sick to my stomach as I heard the news. At the credit union, someone had brought out a TV set and people were watching it numbly.

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My path isn’t yours. I can’t tell you what you should have learned in your 20s, because I’m still learning. I can’t tell you what I wished I knew in college, because we didn’t have the same journey, and we won’t. We can’t.

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Watching some of the World’s most powerful individuals sprint like middle school students on the last day of the school year to see the Discovery brought this point home to me. We’re all looking to be apart of something bigger, we just need to discover what that is.

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I even attended Space Camp in Titusville, Florida and Huntsville, Alabama once at the age of ten and again at twelve using money from my bat mitzvah. I knew how intense the training was and the kind of rigorous physical demands it made on one’s body to be able to be an astronaut. I was weak, with tiny spaghetti arms and a peanut-sized frame. Still, I dreamt of going into space.

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About a week ago, on March 7, NASA officials found 4.2g of blow at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.