There are exactly four weeks left until the last day of finals—that’s 28 days, 672 hours, 40,320 minutes or 2,419,200 seconds. Whichever way you look at it, there’s not much time left in this semester.
For me, this means being that much closer to leaving for Africa on SST, being a senior and having to figure out what in the world I want to do after graduation. While I am more than excited for all of these things to happen, the reality of it all, piled on top of my regular school work and everyday issues, has become quite stressful.At one point, I felt so stressed and overwhelmed that I stopped really caring about what I was doing and why I was doing it—I just felt obligated to finish things.
“This is getting ridiculous,” I thought. I was mentally all over the place. So, I decided to take a leisurely bike ride down to the College cabin to organize my thoughts. And I brought my journal along with me, which I hadn’t written in for years (a journalism major who doesn’t even keep a journal—ludicrous!). Even though I still had a weekend’s worth of homework to do on that Sunday afternoon, I just sat there at a picnic table by the cabin next to some crawling bugs under the pavilion, and I wrote.
After writing for pages and pages about anything that crossed my mind, I had an epiphany.
“Oh yeah!” I thought. “I actually enjoy writing.” I had been so wrapped up in everything I had to do and would need to do in the future that I forgot why I was doing it.
Then I rushed home to eagerly complete all of my homework, driven by my new-found sense of purpose! Or not. But it did help me to regain my focus; it’s a lot easier to get through everything when you have a sense of purpose. What’s yours?
