Blessed

This Thursday, I will be leaving at the buttcrack of dawn on a plane to Baltimore, Maryland. I must admit I never even entertained this as a possibility when I applied to colleges. Johns Hopkins University. Damn. Life's funny like that. I applied on a whim, and now I'm almost certain that I will be spending the next four years of my life there.

I got rejected from Stanford first. I wasn't surprised. haha. I felt oddly emotionally attached from it. Then, Harvard and Yale. I was devastated for three hours. I guess I was naive in thinking I could compete with the top 6% of incoming freshman from all over the world. I'm still disappointed, but I also know that life goes on. Besides, there's always grad school. (;

My dad always tells me that finding inner peace is crucial. How much is enough? I used to think it was a crime to be satisfied with one's own accomplishments. I believed that I had to strive to be the greatest and the best at everything I set my mind to. I guess I'm thankful to have my Dad, who keeps me grounded in reality. He's always there to comfort me in my failures and remind me that there are far more important things to worry about. Wasted emotions, he calls it. While we were climbing Mission Peak, he gave me this Chinese Idiom: "The higher you climb, the lonelier you get." (Yeah, it sounds much more poetic in Chinese.) Today, I was in Ms. Copes room when I saw this quote she put on her wall: "Your best may never be enough for some people, but your worst is never enough for you." These quotes helped me to put my life in perspective.

My life isn't going exactly the way I hoped it would. But then again, that's how life is. Unpredictable. It's a continual struggle for me to define the point at which I am satisfied. How much is enough? I'm glad I got into Johns Hopkins. I think this is God's way of teaching me a life lesson. If I had gotten into Harvard, how happy would I be? I would be incessantly competing against the best and the brightest, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But I also want to focus on other things. I hope that, wherever I end up attending for undergrad, I will have the opportunity to challenge myself, widen my perspective, and prepare for the great future God has in store for me.

I've been on a Lord of the Rings binge of late, so I guess I'll sum this up with a LotR quote:

"All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us."

-Gandalf

Life happens. Now all that's left for me is to decide what to do with this hand I've been dealt.

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