“Right now, can you make an unconditional relationship with yourself – just at the height you are, the weight you are, with the intelligence that you have, and your current burden of pain – can you enter into an unconditional relationship with that?” –Pema Chödrön
In a recent short by HuffPost Black Voices, actress and icon Tracee Ellis Ross was shown being fabulous as usual, and dropping serious knowledge on living for now. She started with that Pema Chödrön quote, which, she says, “changed the direction of my life.”
This part of my life, the final stage of college, is supposed to be about planning for the future and figuring out what comes next – not who we will be but where we will go and what we will do for a living. Too often we are compelled to focus on the future without accepting and enjoying the present.
We have to take the time to stand still and drink in our surroundings. As college seniors, we have spent years building a community and an experience to nurture us into adulthood. In just a couple of months, that community will disperse across the country and world, and that college experience will be over. For first-years and everyone in between, you are still building that community and shaping that experience.
Wherever you are in this journey – not just in college but in life – take some time to stop and enjoy who and where and what you are right now. Don’t spend your whole week just trying to make it until Friday. Don’t constantly wish to fast forward weeks or months or years into the future.
As I have said here before, and as Tracee puts so eloquently: “It’s about the journey. There’s a lot that happens on the path to growing up. And you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Enjoy those spaces and those times and really listen, not just to what’s happening outside of you, but inside of you.”
Young adulthood, in many ways, is a planning stage. It’s the moment between “on your mark” and “go.” You are preparing yourself to leap from the starting blocks, thinking about what will happen when life truly begins, focusing on the adulthood ahead of you, and how you will leave behind the childhood you’re about to shed.
But in this time of transition and planning and getting set, take the time to look up and around and within yourself.
As graduation and “real” life have gotten closer and closer, I have vowed to stop and smell the roses more often, to “do what I’m doing while I’m doing it,” as Tracee says.
And now I have a challenge for all of us: let’s remember Tracee’s words and “be who we are in a really full and beautiful way.”
We have to take the time to stand still and drink in our surroundings. As college seniors, we have spent years building a community and an experience to nurture us into adulthood. In just a couple of months, that community will disperse across the country and world, and that college experience will be over. For first-years and everyone in between, you are still building that community and shaping that experience.
Wherever you are in this journey – not just in college but in life – take some time to stop and enjoy who and where and what you are right now. Don’t spend your whole week just trying to make it until Friday. Don’t constantly wish to fast forward weeks or months or years into the future.
As I have said here before, and as Tracee puts so eloquently: “It’s about the journey. There’s a lot that happens on the path to growing up. And you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Enjoy those spaces and those times and really listen, not just to what’s happening outside of you, but inside of you.”
Young adulthood, in many ways, is a planning stage. It’s the moment between “on your mark” and “go.” You are preparing yourself to leap from the starting blocks, thinking about what will happen when life truly begins, focusing on the adulthood ahead of you, and how you will leave behind the childhood you’re about to shed.
But in this time of transition and planning and getting set, take the time to look up and around and within yourself.
As graduation and “real” life have gotten closer and closer, I have vowed to stop and smell the roses more often, to “do what I’m doing while I’m doing it,” as Tracee says.
And now I have a challenge for all of us: let’s remember Tracee’s words and “be who we are in a really full and beautiful way.”