Summer: A Seasonal Pregame to the Fall

In nearly the same week, I finished undergrad at UNC Charlotte and gave my last tour with the Levine Museum to a group of high schoolers. I feel surprisingly good about it, considering the sense of personal value that both experiences gave to me. It's the end of an era, but new challenges will follow. I'll be sharing my joy for reading at a literacy camp this summer and then pummeled with books and assignments in the fall at law school. In preparation for the demands of law school, my simple goal is to live a healthy lifestyle. By the standards of my peers, my lifestyle is not unhealthy. But it won't give me the limitless enthusiasm needed to encourage and challenge ten kids at the literacy camp this summer and it won't provide the tenacity that law school will demand. The goal is wellness and it will help other goals. With a summer of full time work with youth, this sunny season is a sort of pregame to the upcoming fall in Boston.

The literacy camp that I'm working at is called Freedom Schools. It's a program that encourages self esteem and the appreciation of reading for reading's sake. It appears to be more about fun than academics and it's not institutional. That being said, there is structure to the day. It starts out with dancing and singing, followed by a reading curriculum, and lastly some sort of activity in the later half of the day. I've got a lot of respect for the program and my coworkers are wonderful people. We start training next week.

So, among all of this, my simple goals when not at work include:
- making running, yoga, and mindfulness a priority in my life.
- developing productive conflict resolution skills so that conflict is a source of personal growth rather than a drain.
- getting to bed at a reasonable time on nights when I'm not playing a show.

That's all. It is doable.

While this post is a little more self involved than previous writings, I believe that it's important to be in the right mindset for an environment as challenging Northeastern law.