Four Years

I started classes today. I have been at school in the residence halls for almost three weeks, though, for RA training. I'm emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted, and my first week has only just begun. Great.

But as I go to classes and hear the same speeches about class expectations, rules, academic integrity, assignment policies, blah blah blah blah, over and over again, I find myself bored, wishing I was finished with college. And as my RA job sometimes feels more like babysitting and crowd control than valuable experience and mentoring, I find myself frustrated. And as I feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done that everyone expects me to do, I find myself feeling like a failure, like I'm letting people down. And as I spend time with friends, who will graduate in December or in May, leaving me alone for my senior year, I find myself wishing time would stop right in its tracks.

But today a professor said: "Enjoy this time. It's the best four years of your life."

Here's the thing. This better not be the best four years of my life. Not because I don't love college. I do. I love almost everything about it. But my philosophy is that if my life is not getting (overall) progressively better as the years go by, I'm doing something wrong. When I leave college, I shouldn't then have ahead of me fifty years of letdowns, of wishing I could just be in college again. That isn't to say that life will be a breeze or that there won't be hard times, but I feel like if I'm miserable or upset about something as I go through life, I should work to fix it. I want to be in control of my "destiny" so to speak. I can choose to be happy or choose to spend the rest of my life lamenting about how college was the best four years of my life. I want the former.

Life should get better, not level off or get worse. College shouldn't be it. It should just be another springboard to get to where I want to go.

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. -Abraham Lincoln