Progress Making

Since I will be starting my senior year of classes today, I wanted to take this time to reflect on my experiences and the college experience in general.

Looking back, I feel like I wasted so much time. There were nights I spent just getting wasted. And days following I spent nursing a hangover. There were hours upon hours that probably could add up to full days and months of time that I just spent watching YouTube or Netflix. There were weeks when I didn’t eat anything. And then there were weeks when I ate nothing but junk food. For the past three years (not including this summer) I didn’t go to the gym at all and barely exercised. I stayed up until 3 and 4 in the morning cramming for classes or messing around with friends instead of getting enough sleep to actually function properly.

A lot of these habits are common at university, sometimes even glorified. I feel like that’s a mistake.

I feel like youth is the time we have to truly be intentional and establish long-lasting habits. This time in life is unique in that most students do not have any responsibility except to themselves. We should take that responsibility seriously. This is the time we have to test ourselves. To ask, how much responsibility can I reasonably handle? This is the time we have to train ourselves to do our own laundry and fold it right away, to buy our own groceries, to cook our own meals, to set our own routines of waking and sleeping. Because the thing is, the habits that are established now will stick far into the future. And instead of building healthy ones, I’ve spent time training the habits of binge drinking, procrastination, and laziness.

I don’t want my final year to be like all of the others. I think university should be a place of learning and questioning. It genuinely bothers me that I did not spend more time just really thinking. Thinking things through deeply and carefully. That I didn’t spend much time reading just to learn. That even the readings assigned for class I didn’t always complete. I didn’t spend time writing for myself. Getting down my ideas, putting down my thoughts. Honing the craft and skill of articulating those ideas to others.

I believe those core values are what university is truly about. But I have noticed too much of a tendency within myself to view university as a business transaction. A place to gain skills to help me enter the workplace. And then I became anxious that I wasn’t learning those skills, I didn’t have the right internships, the best resume, I would never get a job. But a university isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a business that teaches you skills. (There are trade schools for that if that’s what you’re looking for). University is a place to learn to think and to challenge yourself to the core. To wrestle with hard questions and to build a strong foundation for any life path.

But just because I wasted a lot of time in the past doesn’t mean I can’t be different now, today. I am not who I was yesterday or even a minute ago. I am who I am now and who I choose to be going forward into the future. Past habits may be hard to break but they can be broken and replaced with healthy ones if we’re willing to be tough. I’m challenging myself to be really tough this semester and to learn, think and grow as much as I possibly can.