Find the things that make me feel passion and enthusiasm

1. Africa – I want to do something about the situation in Africa. The stories of Malawi, Rwanda, and Sudan particularly bother me. We need to explore the conversation about globalization, aid, ethics, and poverty more deeply. Widely. We all need to face these truths.

I don’t understand how anyone could not get fired up by this stuff. Every 5 seconds a child dies from hunger. Hunger! I walk into a grocery store and am surrounded by fresh produce, some of it wilting because nobody picked it. How can this be? How can we have so much access to so many things – necessary and decidedly unnecessary – when so much of the world does not? How is it that families in Africa could survive one more day on the money we spend on our daily coffees, but they don’t receive it?

It’s not that we’re ungenerous. But sending them $2 every day is not going to solve anything long term. The systems aren’t there. The infrastructure. And we need that there. I want to be a part of that movement, however I can.

2. Empowerment.

3. Communities that value sensitivity, communication, questioning, and acceptance of basic humanity. Like I experienced at Antioch. How can I experience that again? Can I build this feeling? Why isn’t this a baseline? How can I make it more mainstream? Is it possible? It has to be.

4. Music – playing it, listening to it, feeling it. I get enveloped by music very easily and am so lucky this happens to me. My parents wanted to raise me to be the kind of person who enjoys life as fully as possible, and they thought music was a key aspect of that. I was introduced to it very early – I think you can train people to be transfixed by music if you get them truly involved with it from an early age. To certain degrees.

I love how I feel on music. I love how it makes me dance, I love how my brain feels playing it. I love the growth, how it makes words extraneous. It’s meditation, but a very special kind that moves to time.

5. Reading amazing books. I can’t explain how I felt when I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, Dickens’ David Copperfield, or Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. They all made me grow in some way. They made me want to change the world I lived in and change myself.

6. Growth. I have an immense passion for growing up to be the wise person I want to be, and will get it through any means necessary.

I used to think there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t get myself moving and motivated. I didn’t want to go to class to get this inane thing called a “good grade,” I didn’t want to do this homework for a subject I didn’t think would serve a purpose in my life, and I didn’t want to go to social functions I would have to act at.

Why?
Part of that mindset was fear of not doing as well as I wanted to – the perfectionist’s drive to avoid situations in which I might appear imperfect. Part of it was also laziness, a reluctance to leave the dank and comfortable hole I was in. Part of it was because I knew I had a lot of potential – I’ve been told that since I was born – and saying, “you’re just not living up to your potential” sounds a lot better than, “you’re on the path to becoming a loser.” Part of it was because I was right, there are a lot of imperfections in the world that I think should be different. But instead of blaming those things for my life, I need to change them.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is…
If I find something I feel really passionate about, I go crazy trying to complete it. I do a much better job than the average person. If I’m assigned a paper on a topic I get really revved up by, I’ll score that A, no doubt. That’s the flip side of perfectionism – you can excel at whatever you put your mind to.

So
I figure that if I find a sense of direction, I’ll be beyond motivated to do what I need to do. I’ve already started setting goals for myself that get me going – get a degree and do really freaking well at school because you can and because you care about being a college graduate and because it will open doors. The problem is, I don’t know what I want beyond that. So I falter sometimes.

I’m looking for it. Once I find it, that degree will be no problem – I’ll be able to concretely frame it as a step I need to complete to get where I want to be. If I really want to be somewhere, the process to get there won’t bother me too much.