There have been moments when I have been driving on the Interstate on my way back to Iowa State, and I get this urge to skip the Ames exit and just keep going.

I suppose it’s a thought we’ve all had at sometime or another. Just this impulse to go someplace else, to do something new, to just start over. I wonder how many people ever act upon these impulses?

When that moment of truth arrives for me, I always find myself — almost out of habit — directing my car onto the exit ramp, no matter how loud the voice in my head chants, “Just keep going, just keep going.”

I don’t know where it is that I want to keep going to, but for a few seconds I contemplate the option of escaping my old life and finding a new one in some far off place.

It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with my present life. But being a college student kind of puts you in a state of suspension that’s not quite on par with the real world. In a way, it’s a lot like going to summer camp for four or five years. We all come together to learn and grow for a short time, but the future inevitably awaits.

And this is a scary thing for a lot of people, myself included — especially when the future is so close you can almost hear it whispering to you, pulling you forward.

In a way, our lives are a lot like arrows. We put them in a bow, pull back the string and aim for some distant target. Once that string is released and that arrow is in flight, it’s pretty damn hard to change its path, so you better hope your aim was straight.

College is where we release the strings and set the arrows in flight. It may very well be one of our last chances to evaluate whether our aim is on target, or for that matter, whether we’re aiming at the right target in the first place.

From the way I understand life, you only get one shot at it. The older I get, the more I question the decisions I have made and the life I have chosen for myself.

In fourth grade, everybody wanted to be a professional athlete or an astronaut or the president. But somewhere along the way, most of us narrowed our goals down to more specific and realistic ideas.

And now here we are, on the cusp of adulthood, awaiting a future that’s almost upon us — a future filled with a lot of potential and hope. But when I’m face to face with that future, I get more than just a little frightened.

Have I done everything I said I would do as a child? If not, I’d better do it soon, because the clock is ticking. And pretty soon, there won’t be much of a chance to look back and evaluate our life’s decisions. Maybe it’s already too late. Maybe we are too far down the path to turn back if we wanted to. Hence that urge to drive off into a new future and a new identity and aim that arrow at a new target.

I seriously doubt that I would ever take that drive, nor will most other people, but I guess that’s not the point. In a way, thinking about that drive lets us keep our lives in perspective, and it gives us a sense of adventure.

No matter how wrapped up we get in our daily routines, it lets us know that our lives are connected to new places and new lives. Minneapolis is three hours away. Chicago is six. The mountains are 13. And a day and a half’s drive will get you to the ocean.

It’s all there if we need it. But as for me, I’ll just visit for now. Maybe the greatest adventure of all is to see where the path you set for yourself takes you and hope it’s on target.

Troy McCullough is a senior in journalism mass communication from Pleasantville. He is the editor in chief of the Daily.