Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Stay Happy

I've been trying this new thing where I go a whole day without being negative. It's sort of working, except when I get around people who know me well enough to know that I'm just faking it and then I end up confessing that I'm conducting an experiment...

The idea came to me from a friend over coffee last week. We were discussing different Chinese philosophies, which inevitably lead to the discussion of Confucius. My friend noticed that I seemed to dwell a lot on all the negative things that were going on (being over-worked, not enough sleep, crumbling friendships, stress over the law school application process &c.) instead of feeling excited about life. "What you believe internally will be manifested externally", is a Confucian idea that my friend revealed to me that morning. And since then I have been trying to maintain a more positive outlook.

The problem is I seem to be stuck in a rut. I'm running the treadmill of going to classes, training for my 10-k, completing apps, and hanging out with the same people I've hung out with all of college. Not that any of this is bad, but its just so predictable that even I'M not excited about my life anymore.

So I've given myself a challenge to do at least one new thing a week. I'm tossing around the idea of blowing off this weekend's homecoming game and taking a trip to Canada for the day, or going to the Run Woodstock event in Pickney that I wanted to do but no one else was really up for. All I know is that I'm 21 years old and free to do whatever I want to do in life and I'm playing it safe. I don't want to wake up some day and regret not doing all the things I could have done now.