It shocks me to think

It shocks me to think that I’ve (almost) completed another year of school.  I remember sitting in my eighth grade history class last year, writing a letter to my future self around the same time of year.  I remember it so vividly…all the people I was sitting with, the classroom I was in, the sounds in the room, the smell of the room.  Everything was so clear in my head.  And now, opening my eyes, I’ve realized that yes, another year has gone by since that memory and everything I remember from was so long ago.  

It shocks me to think back to that first day I walked into my dorm.  I was trying to find my room, yes! 204.  Then going back to the car, and then getting lost because there were confusingly two staircases in my dorm.  I think back to all the confusion I felt…to my first dorm meeting where I met my house counselors and my prefects.  The tension that boiled in the room, the nervous twiddling of the thumbs. I remember that so clearly, but for some reason, it feels like a more distant memory.  Perhaps this is because none of the nervous, jittery feelings I felt with those people, I would feel today.  

It shocks me to think that I’m sitting here, at my computer right now, two hours before the final dance of the school year! I remember talking about all the dances in the fall term with my friend, thinking about what I’d wear, and only imagining what they’d be like.  Thinking what the vibes would be like, what photos we’d take, who I’d dance with.  I remember feeling nervous about these all school dances! There were kids who were up to five years older than me and I thought I’d feel inexplicably young.  And now, with the snap of my fingers, all these dances I’d been looking forward to at the beginning of fall term are almost over.    

It shocks me to think that I may never live with the people in my dorm again.  That we’ll never be one entirety again, living together.  A couple months ago, I couldn’t imagine who else I’d be living with…it felt like my dorm and I, we were forever.  But now, as I’m facing my lower year, I’m facing the realities of, wow, I will probably never be living with all of these people again and I’ll be meeting so many new people.  It’s almost as if each year at Andover is a new year, since there are new classes, new people, new dorms compositions etc.  

It shocks me to think that another season of tennis has already finished.  I remember my season last year with BB&N, and going out for team dinners and the long evening practices until 7.  Last year’s season felt much longer, starting out driving to Winchester to get to the club.  This year, tennis season passed with the snap of my fingers.  Those 90 minute tennis practices that turned into 90 minute laugh sessions with my friends.  The intense matches, where we barely pulled leads.  All those various warm-ups with did, and coping with the varying weather.  Wow, I think now, another season of tennis is over.  

It shocks me to think that I’m almost done with my freshman year of high school and it scares me to realize how much has happened in this one year and how recent all of it felt.  

How genuine happiness manifests

This week has been perhaps one of the biggest emotional roller coasters I’ve been on this week with the most variation.  Sunday and Monday were marked by guilt, anger, and stress from my social life.  Tuesday cooled down a bit as did Wednesday and marked two neutral days this week.  Thursday lightened up since I only had one class that entire day and today, Friday, was wicked fun and leaves me smiling thinking about it. 

Sunset tonight

I must admit I’m one relentless tryhard when it comes to reflection.  It’s even reflected through my tennis game; I stop and reflect on my successes and my failures throughout the game.  I like to reflect while I walk around campus.  At boarding school, I’ve been doing a lot of walking everyday, and during these walks, I check in with myself.  I try to think positively about what happened that day, especially on days where it seems like nothing is going right.  

Truth is, I’ve been chasing positivity.  I’ve found this gets me nowhere close to genuine happiness.  As I was walking back from the WQN Field Night after stopping by the Den to chat with some friends, I realized that true happiness doesn’t need to be reflected on to be felt; it’s there…and I don’t have to intentionally acknowledge.  I’ve been told by my friends that my emotions are very easy to read.  Happiness finds its way into the tone of voice I use when I talk, my posture, the pace at which I walk. Happiness in its truest and rawest form manifests both mentally inside me, but also physically.  

Tonight, I’m truly happy.  In the past, I’ve written about how small things added up are what makes me happy.  I scored well on my math and french tests.  I won my singles tennis match after a long mental battle.  The WQN Field Night was a memorable experience and it’s a night I want to remember from freshman year.  Hundreds of kids showed up on the Great Lawn, the most people I’ve ever seen on the lawn at one time.  I also learned how to play two signature games at PA: spikeball and 9 square.  These are two games that are played spiritually at Andover, as its embedded in our culture.  And what made me smile most was being able to play with kids who I usually didn’t interact with except in class.  In fact, my friends weren’t even there…it was just me and forming relationships with kids who I usually only knew through class.  

There are random things that make my life just a little bit brighter.  Most of them are in my control, but others are not.   I remember during my walks around campus, checking boxes off my mental checklist, thinking that would make me happy.  I thought somehow checking off piano practice, done, math homework, done, english paper, done, would bring me happiness and I tried to focus on what I’d completed that day for happiness.  In retrospect, I realize how much of a workoholic that made me.  However, I’ve come to this conclusion about happiness: focusing on positivity will overall bring more happiness into my life.  However, genuine happiness does not need to be felt through reflection; it manifests itself physically and mentally in an array of manners.  I don’t even have to try to feel it.  It’s just there.  After all, some days are just better than others.  

Why do we need straws?

Last week, I received an email from a parent in response to an article I’d written for the Commentary section of The Phillipian.  I’d written an article about climate change and how the US’s efforts compare to Europe’s in being environmentally conscious.  In the email I received, a link was shared about plastic straws.  This short video expresses the relevancy of straws in American dining, but challenges the real purpose of straws and weighs whether the consequences of incorrect disposal are worth the convenience. 

http://www.strawsfilm.com/

A week after watching the video, I’m still wondering, why do restaurants serve glasses with a plastic straw?  The boy in the video stated it beautifully: because we don’t want to lift the cup our face.  This reason sounded a little ridiculous at first, but I think there is truth in this statement.  While straws might make sense with someone with a neck injury, restaurants usually serve every drink with a straw, whether it be a glass of water, milk, juice, or soda.  It's a range, certain restaurants are certainly very conscious about their carbon footprint. However, it’s amazing how one little straw can affect terrestrial and aquatic life. In the video, a straw was caught in the nostril of a sea turtle.  It’s amazing how something that seems so irrelevant in our lives can affect aquatic life. 

There have been petitionings at local restaurants to stop serving drinks with plastic straws and in many instances this has been successful.  I don't think change has to be this large scale.  I think small commitments will also make an impact. I plan on telling the waiters at restaurants that straws won’t be necessary for our drinks.  Every straw we can save can make a difference.  The parents who emailed me also said in her household she uses glass straws, which are reusable.  Is it feasible for restaurants to use glass straws?  Afterall, why do we need straws? 

Do something everyday that scares you

Do something everyday that scares you. That’s what Eleanor Roosevelt wisely stated.  Frankly, I struggle to step outside of my comfort zone, and I tend to muse over situations for a while before making them.  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more introspective than when I was younger.  Perhaps this is natural with age but I've become better at thinking things over than when I was younger.  I’m not as blunt as I used to be and my actions are more reserved.  

Yesterday, I went outside at night for a walk and some boys in my class were playing basketball by our cluster deans house.  I usually don’t hang out with these people, and there have been innumerable times I’ve passed them playing, yet just walked by.  It was different yesterday.  A goal of mine for next year is to be more relaxed, or “chill” as they say, and I believe I will be able to forge more friendships.  One of the boys made a beautiful three-point shot, and instead of walking right past the court, I stopped and acknowledged the shot.  It was a pretty simple acknowledgement.  I shouted, “Hey! Nice shot!”  

In the blur of the event, that was the most frightening moment; shouting something out and being in that insecure position of not knowing how my classmates would react.  I was half afraid they’d judge me, and the other half of me was afraid I would run away in cowardice.  Except none of that happened.  Well, maybe I was judged a little bit, but my classmates invited me to join casually.  And that’s how I ended up playing basketball on a 70 degree spring night at 10:30 PM in my cluster deans driveway.  It was exhilarating.  I haven’t touched a basketball in years, and at the same time, I got some pretty good laughs through being with these people.  

Do something everyday that scares you.  It’s difficult to describe the feeling that rippled through me.  It was an eccentric mix of cowardice, tension, anxiety, and excitement.  Nevertheless, I got some good big belly laughs, and I learned that I just have to try to step out. It's also a great conversation opener.  I’m a broken record.  I’ve written about appearing more relaxed before, but it’s hard when my personality, my style, and my conduct gives off vibes of being strict with myself.  Perhaps it’s time to start cherishing that giddy feeling that permeates when I do step out of my comfort zone.  

Do something everyday that scares you.  

Why do we choose to struggle

Why do high schoolers put themselves through so much stress? Why do we do this when we could just go through life, doing as little as possible?  Why do high schoolers engage in so much activity all the time? I kept wondering this question throughout my week.  Why do we choose to struggle?  

I think it’s because exposure to struggle from an early age teaches people how to cope with struggle/stress/work later in life.  We choose to struggle because we know it will help us grow into more mature people.  We choose to struggle because it teaches us how to deal with problems later in the future.  My history teacher said to my class that while writing essays is important because it hones writing skills, a better reason to write essays is because going through the stress and the process helps an individual learn how they work best.  My teacher always says this to us when we’re given a major assignment, “you’ll thank me later.”  It’s almost more about figuring out ourselves.  

Struggle is also about the journey.  I like to think that high school is the next step from college which is the next step from entering the workforce.  There’s no one straight line through any of these areas and some people go through life letting just letting it happen. Others try too hard to make it tip one way or the other. My counselor told me this week to see each major step in my life as a playground for developing skills for the next level and that I should strive for a healthy equilibrium between letting life happen and controlling it with the utmost force.  To be free, to let go, to fail, to try again, to fail again, and to fail better, then to learn.  This is why many high schoolers choose to struggle. 

How I cope with stress lately

My diary has gone out the window.  I wrote my first diary in first grade, when my mom told me it might be nice to record my daily thoughts.  I remember going to Staples and getting a Mead cardboard back notebook with painted peonies on the cover.  It was an extremely satisfying and fulfilling moment when I finished writing that diary of mine, almost as if I’d closed another period of my life. However, in middle school, I noticed my diary entries begin to decrease with the accretion of extracurriculars and school work.  I began to write less regularly, and whenever I managed to scrape some time together to write an entry, it would always be an outline of everything I did that particular day and rarely included my thoughts, emotions, and feelings.  

Since coming to Andover though, I’ve found another way to write meaningful “diary” entries.  This is through my community engagement.  I do Adopt-a-Platoon, where each week, I write a letter to a soldier.  Our school sends letters to a platoon in Poland, and although I never get responses back, in these entries we’re supposed to write about positive things that happen in our lives (in general, writing about happiness).  This is my third term doing Adopt-a-Platoon, and it’s honestly one of the more relaxing minutes during my Monday night.  It’s fairly relaxing being able to decorate a colorful letter, and write about positive things that happened in the week, and is almost like a mindfulness exercise.  In English, my teacher also requires us to keep a journal.  We can write about anything, but this term especially, I’ve found myself writing more about my emotions and feelings.  

This may seem like a somewhat random post, but I’ve been thinking about how I cope with stress lately.  My tactics have varied from year to year, but throughout middle school and for at least the first two terms of high school, exercise was my go-to.  It was fast paced, it got my adrenaline pumping, and I could simultaneously blast my favorite playlists and exercise continues to be my go-to stress reliever. However, I’m finding that writing is also helping me understand my feelings.  More so, why I feel the way I feel, rather than exercising and banishing all the stress go away, only to find it return sometime later.  I’ve been writing in my English notebook about my feelings and things that have been stressing me out.  I’ve noticed how it’s always similar things that stress me out: social life and major assessments. It’s a repeated pattern, and I think I’ve been finding that through my writing down my feelings.  Writing slows down time, and it reminds me to notice what’s happening in my life, rather than scurry through life, tackling one task after another. 

Spring

I think I’m finally feeling signs of Spring here in New England.  It’s been a long winter and it even snowed in April.  Due to climate change, the New England weather fluctuates a lot.  I remember how in March, I thought it was going to be spring!  The snow was melting, and some days, it would reach highs of 70 degrees…only to be met by a snowstorm the following day.  I suppose this correlated with my fluctuating moods last term as well.  

Sam Phil

In the past, I wrote about how campus is different every time I come back from break.  It’s been a little while since break (a month!), but campus is finally starting to feel a little bit different.  The days are longer, for one.  The sun doesn’t set until it’s nearly study hours and I feel campus is more lively because of these longer hours of light.  When I’m walking to dinner for example, I’ll see people chilling on the lawn, or playing a game of spikeball.  The Great Lawn is dotted with students, some doing work, some hanging out, others working on their tans.  When I’m walking around campus from class to class, people are wearing shorts!  And t-shirts!  And fewer kids are buried beneath layers of down.  When I walk to our gym, I no longer see endlessly empty fields just waiting to be used; they’re now covered with athletes, playing baseball, lacrosse, tennis, and softball.  Simply seeing people outside makes me happy.  I don’t know why, but people and nature go together in my head.  There’s an evident sense of merriment in the air and the classroom vibes are lighter; there are more smiles and there are more laughs.  While a New England winter is a truly unique experience, perhaps Spring is here for the better. 

The Serenity In Motion

One part of my life that I miss a lot is riding in cars, essentially being able to travel at high speeds.  I didn’t realize how calming riding in a car was when that daily hype was taken out of my life coming to boarding school.  I rediscovered this when I returned home (rode on the highway), and today, when I went to Boston for a non Sibi project.  

In middle school, I used to take the school bus home with my friends.  However, when I was on the bus, my friends perpetually commented on how I was always looking out the window and not engaging in the conversation.  I would be very talkative while we were waiting for the bus to arrive, or when we were hanging out, yet as soon as I sat down on a seat, I’d become really quiet, just staring out the window.  The scenes are fairly consistent; on a highway, it’s tree after tree, and in the suburbs, it’s house after house.  I take an odd pleasure in observing them though.  I don’t even know exactly what’s going through my head while I’m staring out the window…I just enjoy it.  I also grew up riding in cars.  My mom tells me when I was younger, if I couldn’t fall asleep at night, she and my dad would drive to lull me to sleep.  Perhaps the motion of being in a car is coming to me in that sense, and it’s connections to my childhood.

In addition, when I’m in a moving vehicle, going at high speeds, everything is a blur.  It feels like I am moving fast in life.  It feels like I’m getting somewhere.  I suppose that idea in itself also calms me down. 

My inspiration from Mr. Hurley

My math teacher, Mr. Hurley, is one of the most inspiring teachers I’ve had in my education career.  Part of what makes this man so interesting is his past experiences, and while all people have individual and equally unique and meaningful pasts, Mr. Hurley takes what he learned from his past and brings it to class.  He does not exclusively teach math, he also emphasizes character building.  Coming from his fun, collaborative classes four times per week, I think I’ve grown as a character.  This is perhaps an even more important accomplishment than learning precalculus.    

Two of my favorite Mr. Hurley ideas:

“I don’t want to pity to for your failures, I want to praise you for your success.”  He said this to my class after our first math test where the none of us performed exceedingly well.  He said he wasn’t going to make the tests easier…in fact, they were only going to become increasingly difficult.

“I’m not your teacher, I’m your consultant.  If you come to class just a day ahead of where you need to be, you’ll know what you don’t know.  My job, as your consultant, is to fill in those gaps for you.”  Mr. Hurley talked a lot about this during our first couple of classes.  He shares how he got through college being just a day ahead in his work, because then, one really knows what they don’t know.

And most recently, Mr. Hurley shared his experiences at the Naval Academy.  He related this to PA, and how similar the experiences are.  I’m a broken record.  I think I’ve said this too often, but I truly believe the beautiful thing about PA is that we take students from all over the world.  Many are from the US, many are even from Massachusetts, and a solid portion are international students.  Hurley told us how he went through high school: not trying would result in a B+, and trying would give an easy A.  At one point, he thought he was some kind of genius.  

However, after getting into the Naval Academy, he found his grades at the lowest point ever.  He says the Naval Academy made an overt effort to take him and all his peers down peg by peg.  Downsizing.  Some of us (myself included), come out of middle school having played a high school varsity sport, been a straight A student, played in music groups, while managing several extracurriculars.  In fact, for a while, I honestly did believe I was a pretty darn outstanding student.  

Coming to PA changed this.  I was thrown into a community where everyone was as outstanding as I was in some way or another.  It’s harder to pull off A’s, sport teams are infamously competitive, music groups are harder to get into, and it’s much harder to organize a club/event.  When Mr. Hurley told me this, I was shocked at how true his statement was, “And it happens here at Andover as well as the Naval Academy, you come here from the top of your class and then peg by peg you’re taken down. That’s when you learn that you have to fight for everything you want”.  

While Mr. Hurley is right in saying one will have to fight harder for what they want due to the increased competition, I also believe it provides insight for extremely well rounded students about what they truly excel in.  Being at the top of the class is good for a bit, however, for me, it was difficult to sense what I was truly good at.  At Andover, I’m figuring out I really have to fight for whatever I want.  It will make the time between each of my major accomplishments longer, but it’ll be well worth the fight.  I go back to the quote I mentioned in an earlier post: Nothing worth having comes without struggle.

What I learned about investing this week

This past Thursday, I brought in a speaker for Andover Business Club.  Mr. Charland is the CEO of Wilkins Investment Counsel in Boston, and he came talked to Andover Business Club about personal finance and money management.  This club meeting was a little different from what we usually do.  ABC is a 100% discussion based club, but this one time, our meeting involved more listening than speaking.  I thought the topic was also a little bit different than what we usually talk about, which is business, marketing, timing, and how to launch products etc.  This time, we learned a little about investing.  

According to Charland, the biggest mistake people in our era are making, is selling as soon as the markets begin to go down because of panic.  I think panic is both my friend and my enemy.  I despise panicking on major assessments, but in this scenario, it is actually a good thing to buy when everyone else to selling (or panicking).  I learned that in a bull market, the last 25% will account for 40.2% of the gain on average, and the last 25% of a bear market will account for 46% of the drop.  A bear market will also, on average, occur every 7.3 years.  

There were many interesting stats that I learned, and another interesting one was about long term investment.  My dad always told me to think long term and leave the stocks for long term.  Now, I have data and history to prove this. Charland printed out a slide showing how longer holding periods reduce risk.  It’s quite a dramatic chart.  For an S&P 500 portfolio, holding for one year could at a minimum value, make an investor lose 43%.  This again, has to do with emotions and panic.  If an investor sees a stock go down, they panic and start to sell everything which ultimately leads to losing more money than he/she started with.  However, on the other end of the spectrum, holding an S&P 500 portfolio for any given 20 year period, according to history, shows that one cannot possibly lose money.  I find that stat very interesting.   In addition, there is a chart that shows the power in starting early.  I think this is especially important in our era, where managing our finances is becoming increasingly important.  Charland showed us a chart depicting how investing early really makes a huge difference.  Giving more time to invest before retirement is a no brainer.  

Charland believes that many more people could have a million dollars right now than people who actually do, simply because of this one thing: emotions.  When an investor sees that suddenly, one day, half their capital is gone, is can be very startling and can cause panic.  However, Charland reiterated many times to push past those days, because there are stats that show the power in longer holding periods. I liked how Charland printed out copies of the slideshow for all the participants at our meeting.  When I first looked at these charts, I was very confused and I didn’t understand what any of it meant.  Now, I look at this 14 page slide show and I think can explain almost every chart.  It amazes me how much one can learn in 40 minutes.