Ambition - this is what propels: not the alarm clock or to the to do list, but the flames of drive that scorch these actions into realities. It's our catalyst suited in passion and armored with determination. What image one assigns with this word can reveal much.

There is, of course, the slightly more negative connotation of an edgy enterpriser scaling the food chain and doing whatever it takes, or maybe a high stakes athlete looking for a certain number in their contract or in their stats. This word contains something more than the societal stigma it can occasionally carry in our shared schemas - ambition is power. True power of human desire and will to attain a goal, and without it, where are we moving? Recycled stories is what so easily people can adopt without that internal blaze that sends the ship forward into new waters, horizons of actual success according to their own thresholds.

On an individual scale, it is that release of fear and inhibition in an effort to fully attach oneself to something that is not in his or her hands, but something that he or she wants bad enough to make tangible. Deciding each day to work with total abandon and remain honest with oneself, to never let up nor give up, is the rubble that ambition is made of, and it is from this rubble that human beings have and continue to build great things, both literally and metaphorically.

What cannot be neglected is the ambition that is supposed to run deep in the rivers of all of our innermost selves. In an aching world, the goal for better courses through anyone who flips through a history textbook or looks up at the scene before us: it goes without saying that overseas terrorism is not only present, but it is a serious, serious force. Our very own turn on one another, but there is something inky black horrible in the screams of petrified pedestrians in Paris and in the images of Turkish people dead, scattered all over the streets. Rage Day and the battle between police and the African American race, alongside Black Lives Matter: where is the end point. The big picture is what seems to get lost time and time again. And here we have what to alter this broken reality?

Nothing but ourselves. Ambition cultivated in gardens of true, honest intent for betterment and for success of the common good is an ambition that we all should carry. The world will never be perfect, but we could use some peace. My overarching point being that it is the movement, ambition that is, the ripple beneath the well distributed carpe diem that provides the truest form of living is the simple, straightforward raft in the sea of one's dreams, and there is only one person who can truly steer it.