Young adults realize full potential experiencing new opportunities
As Columbia gears up for a new school year, I can’t help but be envious of all the students starting or continuing their studies at USC. If there is anything I’ve come to miss since I left home to study abroad for a year in Hong Kong, it’s the excitement of being back in Gamecock Nation with the new and old friends I’ve grown so close to in the past year — swapping class schedules, setting up lunch dates at Russell House and applying for tickets to the next big football game.
In about two weeks, I will be starting school again as well, but this time in a foreign country roughly 8,000 miles away from home. I imagine I will feel somewhat like a freshman again — slightly confused and more than slightly apprehensive with a campus map glued to my hand and a thirst to prove myself.
Neale Donald Walsch, an author of books on spirituality, said, “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone,” and as I sit here on the wooden plank they call a bed here in Hong Kong wondering why exactly I so voluntarily gave up being in a place I loved with people I loved to pitch myself across a couple continents, I realize that these few words have never been more applicable.
In two weeks I will be hunting for clubs to join, hopefully making friends in my classes and once again trying to find my niche in a place that I’m not quite yet accustomed to. I will once again be trying desperately to mold myself to my new surroundings while simultaneously molding my surroundings to me.
In two weeks, I will once again experience what it is to gain my own independence, to be a small fish, to be a lost sheep. Honestly, I couldn’t look forward to it more.
We, as young adults with infinite possibilities, aren’t meant to experience life within the tight boundaries we so often find ourselves in. It’s easy to settle into unchanging routines, to restrict ourselves to the company of those we have been comfortable with all our lives. But sometimes it’s not until we step out of these margins that we truly realize our full potential.
So as the school year starts again, be it in South Carolina or in Southeast Asia, let this serve as a reminder to us all to seek life outside of our comfort zones and to seek it with vigor. It can be as simple as picking a strange and interesting class or trying to get to know someone you never thought you’d befriend.
This is our chance to take risks, to grow, to learn, to live.
Let’s not let it go to waste.