COLUMN: Leave Mount Pleasant for a while — hit your reset button and start fresh
I'm writing this column from a small, one bedroom apartment in New Orleans, Louisiana. Outside, two cats are fighting and the rain is hitting the air conditioning hard enough that it sounds like drumming on an angry washing machine.
My boyfriend is snoring from the bedroom like he’s getting paid to do it.
Earlier in the night on Bourbon Street I almost had my wallet stolen, my blisters developed blisters and I’m fairly sure I got conned out of $90 under the guise of it being for drinks that were 99 percent fruit juice, 1 percent alcohol.
This is the most at peace I’ve been in a while.
During a time when I am up to my ears in projects, figuring out graduation plans and dealing with the aftermath of covering the March 2 shooting at Central Michigan University — I needed a break. And I found it: in one of the loudest, most historic cities in the south.
The trip was a chance to press my mental reset button.
Instead of worrying about when I was going to pencil in another work meeting, my toughest decision was if I wanted to go on one ghost tour versus another. Rather than beating myself up over not getting enough done in a day, the most pressing thing was figuring out the perfect restaurant for lunch.
My problems boiled down to how we were going to fit everything in our car on the way home and whether or not my stomach was as big as my eyes were.
At the risk of sounding dramatic, this was probably the last Spring Break of my life. It was also the first Spring Break trip during my time as a student.
While it cost a nice bit of cash to make a reality — the trip was something we had been saving for since November — there wasn’t a price tag I could put on coming back to Mount Pleasant with a new perspective on things.
As students, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger things. For some of us, our whole world boils down to grades in classes or how we’re going pay rent and still have money for groceries.
That’s not to say those things aren’t important. Keep your grades up, your belly full and a roof over your head.
But take a step back every once in a while.
Evaluate where you are in life and where you want to be.
By the time you read this, you might be in class or at home or even maybe still clinging to the last vestiges of break. You might be taking a breather in between studying or finishing up homework. Things might seem hard, they might seem impossible — but they’re not.
Wherever you are, know this isn’t where you’re going to stay.
Sometimes it hard to see that our biggest problems right now aren’t actually problems at all, just tiny speed bumps in the overall road of life.
It might take a weekend trip back home or to some other in-state destination. Or, it might take traveling more than 4,000 miles to figure that out.
