The 3 A's of Awesome

            This Ted Talk came right in the nick of time.  Just yesterday I found myself feeling really down and negative because I have a million and a half things to do over the course of the next week (write a paper, take a test, study for another test that’s worth 35% of my grade, plan this alumni networking event, and keep on top of all of my day-to-day reading and homework…).  I was slowly spiraling down into a pit of despair, one which I felt I could not dig myself out of.  But then I stopped to think: I am healthy, financially stable, fairly intelligent, a student at a fun and excellent university, and I can count a million other blessings.  Why am I so miserable, or rather, why am I allowing myself to think I’m so miserable?  Things are not that bad.  I liked all three of Neil Pasricha’s A’s, but my favorite, and the one I was most lacking yesterday, was awareness.  There are so many miracles and beautiful details in the world around us every day, and the majority of them go unnoticed and unappreciated.  But I find when I force myself to notice these things, I also find it absolutely inexcusable to be unhappy about things that, in the big picture, don’t matter that much.  I think this is something we could really tap into as a council.  At the end of last winter semester, finals started on a Saturday.  I decided to take a break from studying and a friend and I spent over three hours drawing pictures and writing poems in colorful chalk on the sidewalk/plaza outside the JFSB.  We invited everyone who walked past us to leave their mark and we got a huge response!  People loved it.  It was fun, simple, not at all time-consuming, and it appealed to the three-year old inside each of us.  People walked away smiling and they told us they felt less stressed and more prepared to face their finals.  It was a wonderful experience, and it made people stop and revel in one of life’s simple pleasures.  I'm thinking...we should do something like that. :) 

Kathryn Schulz: On Being Wrong

This topic, this human need to be right all of the time (to the extent that we tell ourselves we are right, we believe we are right, even when we are clearly wrong) is an interesting one that I haven’t thought about much before watching this TED talk.  But she’s definitely hit on something.  I felt guilty when she showed the “series of unfortunate assumptions” up on the screen, because I react that way most of the time when I encounter people who think and act much differently than I myself do.  I usually peg them as ignorant, dumb, or evil (maybe that’s too strong of a word, but somewhere along those lines…) because the only alternative is to accept their view of life as valid and well-informed, and doing that means accepting that my way is not the only way, that my version of reality is not directly equivalent with Absolute Truth.  It’s a huge fault of mine that I am continually working on (I’ve come a long way since high school) but I still fall into those fallacious assumptions from time to time.  To apply this to the Council, even though we are all Humanities College students, we still have different backgrounds, interests, and life-styles that contribute to the way we perceive the world.  And, most likely, we all think we’re right.  So how do we overcome this need to be right?  How do we reconcile our view of the world with those of others?  Because we need to be able to do these things in order to serve the students of the Humanities College, who also have different views from our own.  One of my favorite quotes was, “Because, unlike God, we don't really know what's going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.”  Maybe if we recognize that human productivity and creativity is only possible when we have a plethora of diverse opinions and experiences, we will be more open to the possibility of our own wrongness, or at least, the narrowness of our own experience.