Sounds of innocence and experience

This ending week has been very life changing.

By talking to Gauri (a source of inspiration and wisdom that has taken the form of an IB English teacher and University Guidance counsellor) I realized a lot of things. I came to India for a reason. All the things that happened for me to get here seem almost planned now that I look back. Maybe destiny, maybe energy, maybe karma, I don't know, I don't know if I'll ever have a definite answer. It gave me a lot of peace, I felt a lot more awake, and happy afterwards. Meditation is helping as well. Now I just wake up like an hour before class and I'm super awake. And I've learned the importance of some things, like taking significant care of all of myself, not just eating and sleeping but also getting peace and rest when I need it. Now I've come to a point where I need to sit and start taking things off my back. Overworking myself, even though I've got a special passion or reason for each of the things I do and that doesn't make them feel like a load, is not helping.

Then another conversation with Rickie, one of my first years, I regained much of the energy and will I had to learen about the world. Coming to India is a chance to take a travel inside yourself, augmented by the UWC experience. Just imagine, a chance where you can compare, contrast and adjust your lifestyle with so many different ways of looking at life from so many countries, and it's all happening in the culture where teachers are above god and father and mother. The place where knowledge is what brings you closer to your "higher being". The place where the spirit and the body become almost a dicotomy and at the same time parts of a whole. I feel really blessed to be here. And I discovered that being the emotional (sometimes dramatic) human being I am, I should use that energy as my trigger to follow my passions and goals instead of rationalizing. Understanding why I need to go to school was not enough to actually push me to go and do things. Experiencing and connecting what I'm learning here to what drives me and makes the world go round for me is really what has changed the way I see school. It's the way in which I can learn to improve my self understading, the way in which I can hone myself to go out and do what I love and change the world accordingly.  I felt selfish as well. This is such an expensive oportunity in many ways. The amount of time, money, effort and interest that is put in getting each of us here is amazingly big, and having that in mind I just can't see how people can go on and living a live only for themselves afterwards. It's so easy to turn that around and say that giving back is to "pay" back the scholarship we get. But it's not only about the money, you can give back in so many ways. This place depends on it. So many people could benefit by dividing all the resources spent in only ONE of us... and we're at least 200 students.

Finally, I feel like I could never give up this oportunity. And even though the time will come for us to go, as it came for our second years, it comes with the package.

So for now, let's live in the present. The happy, overworked, diverse, but full of things to offer present.