April 15, 2013 • A POSITIVE PRESS PUBLICATION • VOL. 3, ISSUE 11
Emersonian Life Lessons
written by second-year, Taylor Tokarz
1. “WHAT WE DO NOT CALL EDUCATION IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN THAT WHICH WE CALL SO.” –SPIRITUAL LAWS
When I think about what I’ve learned over the course of my life, the lessons that stick out aren’t always the ones from academia. For me, the lessons of greatest value come from spending time with my parents, cooking homemade pizza on Friday nights, or going to Waffle House at 2 a.m. when I should be studying. These lessons come from simply living through enough misadventures that I’ve found a fraction of an original thought, a new way of thinking. 2. “OUR FRIENDSHIPS HURRY TO SHORT AND POOR CONCLUSIONS, BECAUSE WE HAVE MADE THEM A TEXTURE OF WINE AND DREAMS, INSTEAD OF THE TOUGH [FIBER] OF THE HUMAN HEART.” –FRIENDSHIP I cannot tell you how badly I needed to learn this lesson earlier on in life. Everyone has had a friend crush—someone whose personality you catch a glimpse of and then, whoops! You’re Facebook stalking them and thinking, “I really want to post something hilarious on their wall to show them we’re best-friend-compatible, but I also need to play it cool… maybe a private message of a Jennifer Lawrence gif!” The thing is, new friends cause a lot of commotion, but if we get all wrapped up in the idea of someone, we’re actually ignoring who they are. |
3. “THE ONLY THING GRIEF HAS TAUGHT ME IS TO KNOW HOW SHALLOW IT IS.” –EXPERIENCE
I’ve grown up in a family in which jokes are currency. When overly frustrated, humiliated, or upset, my dad always asked one thing: “Why be sad when you can be happy?” It was never said to slight our emotions, but instead used as encouragement; every melancholic event has a proper mourning period, but there’s a lot to be said for picking yourself up and embracing a new day. 4. “GOOD AND BAD ARE NAMES READILY TRANSFERABLE TO THAT OR THIS; THE ONLY RIGHT IS WHAT IS AFTER MY CONSTITUTION; THE ONLY WRONG WHAT IS AGAINST IT.” –SELF-RELIANCE I never let this sentence leave my mind. For a long time I struggled with what it meant to be a “good” person and for me a “good” Catholic while maintaining my individual beliefs outside of the ones my religion prescribed to me. Then I stumbled upon this text. Not only has it changed how I view myself, but how I view others. It taught me to value the fact that everyone comes from a different place, has a different perspective on life, and abides by a different moral code. Nobody is right or wrong. We’re all just doing our best to be happy. |
5. “‘ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU ARE AFRAID TO DO.’” –HEROISM
This one is tricky. I still struggle with it. But I’ve found that the most enlightening, hilarious, life-changing moments came to me when I let little pockets of courage bubble to the surface. Of course there’s fear on the outskirts of your comfort zone, but there’s also adventure! So whether you fall on your face or land on your feet, you’ll have a great story to tell. For me, Emerson’s words have permanence. They reach me in a way very few words do. These words have stuck with me and guided me and shaped my perceptions, but they’re just a handful of words to be read. So go forth! Find someone who speaks to your mind and allow yourself to be taught something new. |
Curing with CURE
written by second-year, Sophie Frankham-Smith
Third-year nursing school student Emily Howell has a passion for helping others and uses that passion as the Executive Director of CURE at UGA. CURE is an international non-profit organization that raises money for hospitals in 14 different countries around the world that provide healthcare for children with curable diseases.
CURE at UGA is the first college chapter of CURE to be formed: Katie Rae Spell and Katherine Adams established it at UGA in 2010. Since then, CURE has grown on campus and has made a significant impact around the world. There are now CURE chapters at other universities, and the UGA chapter will set the precedent for future CURE college chapters around the country. |
Last summer Emily, along with three others, traveled to Uganda to do mission work at a CURE hospital. They got to visit an orphanage and a health center to see first-hand the impact that the CURE organization has. The kids who CURE hospitals treat are often cast out of society and are seen as useless because of their sicknesses. Families of these children also feel the social burden as they are usually abandoned by their villages. The CURE international hospital in Uganda that Emily visited treats kids with diseases such as Hydrocephalus which is water on the brain, and Spina Bifida, a spine that isn’t fully formed. These diseases come from being born in unclean conditions and from mothers not taking folic acid when pregnant, things that we may take for granted. CURE not only treats these kids, but also follows up with them and their families.
“CURE aligns so well with what my heart is passionate about,” Emily said, “It has challenged me to see outside myself and encouraged me in so many ways.” CURE at UGA plans events and fundraisers throughout the year including events at local high schools to raise money for CURE hospitals. CURE at UGA finished up the semester with their much-anticipated fundraiser, Spring Shag. Spring Shag was a dance event on Herty field that no doubt left people who attended wanting more. The event featured live music, swing dancing, and most importantly, raised money for surgeries around the world! Check out Spring Shag and CURE at UGA at: http://cureatuga.weebly.com. |
Adaptation
written by by first-year, Alexsis Skeen
In the blink of an eye she watched as her world disappeared.
Everything she once knew was now strikingly different Like a tornado tearing through the city It took away structure and stability Overturning unfinished plans Upsetting the balance. Tattered, broken, torn. How can she Adapt? |
A fresh start.
A shot at redemption. She questions, discovers, explores Picking up the pieces after the storm Salvaging a piece here, a piece there. Delicately making her way through the rubble Acknowledging the opportunity at her fingertips Learning who she is, who she’s not, who she wants to be, Recollecting and reinventing her life as a single masterpiece. |
Timeless
written second-year, Kristen Lemaster
In an interview four weeks ago, they fired a question at me that had it been an actual bullet, I would have died a painful death struggling to articulate one of the most challenging concepts of our generation: “How do you manage your time when you do so many things on campus?”
It was the kind of question that made me want to lean back in my chair at a trendy little café and sip almond milk and re-evaluate my entire life, because it should have been super easy to answer. It should have been a simple matter of delineating the process, making a checklist, turning the solution into a paint-by-numbers masterpiece so that anyone four years and older could complete it. It wasn’t easy, and I didn’t know how to explain it then, but I think I have a better idea now. Time flies when you’re having fun, which you might think would mean that all of our wonderful opportunities at the university are sucking up our time in a vacuum of awesome. If you’re part of an organization you love, though, you know that isn’t true. The moments do pass quickly, but they also pass with a sense of purpose and the |
realization that what you are doing matters. That time forces you to acknowledge your heart beating in your chest and the miracle of being alive and the ache in your bones reminding you that the world needs someone like you, even if you don’t yet know why. Manage your time by doing things that make you feel victorious over time instead of like another victim; manage your time instead of letting it manage you.
Part two of my response would address a quote by H. Jackson Brown Jr. that now pops up in my mind at least once a week: “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” It can read like a pretty powerful guilt trip, but I think it can also read as a wake-up call, the alarm going off in your head that nobody is making you waste your time doing something that isn’t fulfilling in some capacity. A fantastic article by Laura Vanderkam in The Wall Street Journal titled “Are You As Busy As |
You Think?” is guaranteed to make you modify your definition of “busy.” Vanderkam suggests that by replacing phrases like “I don’t have enough time” with “that’s not a priority,” we can change how we value and measure our time. Do you really not have time to call your best friend from high school, or is it just not a priority? Would you really not be able to make time this weekend to read a book you’ve always wanted to read, or are you just not making it a priority?
My answer to that tough question, four weeks late, is that I can do so many things on campus because to me they aren’t just things. They are people and passions, and they are priorities. They are timeless. |
Math in the Real World
written by second-year, Erin Orr
Mathematics. The majority of people who I’ve talked to associate this word with negative things like hatred, death or torture. A little extreme for my taste, but hey, I get it; math is hard! I’m a Math Education major and this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. It’s been my experience that people usually major in things that they both enjoy and are good at, but in my case, I only have one of the two covered. I LOVE MATH. But I am not good at it whatsoever.
Whenever I’m in one of my math classes, I love to come up with different ways to learn the material. I do this best by thinking of math as it relates to our lives and how people work. We are mathematical creatures, we just don’t realize it! Simply put, derivatives measure a rate of change. For example, acceleration is a simple measure of miles per hour: at any moment, we are able to see by how much a car’s speed changes. This means that if we can take a |
derivative of any change in time, we can see how much that change is changing.
This is where my brain comes in. When I think of change, I often think of the change that has happened within me. I think of the change that we can be in this world. I think of the change that I have made in my friends lives or at my school or how they have changed me. But with change comes time. We all know how long it can take to change something, but maybe something can take a very short amount of time to change. |
Therefore, this means that if we take one minute to change a light bulb or one year to change a bad habit or one lifetime to change our attitudes, we can always take the derivative of it. We can see, at any given moment, if we were changing in a big way or a little one. We can measure if the changes we are making in our lives are real or imaginary (but that’s another math lesson for another time!) Is your derivative positive or negative? Is it concave up or concave down? Is it increasing or decreasing? Is it steep or gradual? Go measure your change and make a mathematical difference!
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Imparting an IMPACT
written by second-year, Danielle Meinert
Service is love made visible.
This is IMPACT’s motto, and the mantra that many of the program’s participants utter when their service gets surprisingly difficult, mentally taxing, or confusing. “How can we help in just one week,” I said the first day of my IMPACT trip, “if the people we help know that we will leave by Saturday?” One week is minimal, no doubt, but I found it was enough to positively influence the people I met and the organizations I worked with. My group, originally composed of strangers, changed our city as we chose to live with empathy. I traveled to New Orleans for seven days: we worked in HIV/AIDS shelters, homeless shelters, and nonprofits with focuses like an organization called BreakOUT: “to fight the criminalization of LGBTQ youth in New Orleans, LA.” I learned about privileges I didn’t even know I had-- these discoveries |
inspired me to transform a group’s mistreatment into basic liberties.
At first I didn’t think repainting yellow lines in a parking lot would change a city and its culture, but our service changed people’s perspectives. The executives in charge of the youth shelter and its parking lot didn’t have the time or resources to repaint it themselves. I also didn’t initially realize how elsewhere, the volunteers at an HIV/AIDS shelter were able to better focus on the patients while we prepared for their garage sale. Later, a full-time volunteer at a nonprofit opened a sacred safe space to us, and the minister at an inclusive church prayed for a participant having a rough day. As we offered our love, the people we served poured gratitude upon us; they remembered that people care about them. They remembered that they matter. And if our IMPACT trip didn’t |
volunteer with these groups, we wouldn’t have met people with such incredible stories. At the HIV/AIDS shelter, a man who had graduated from their care three months prior came to visit. He had started to work as their chef because of the shelter’s effect on his life; he was homeless and HIV-positive when he arrived, but they helped him get the necessary medications, training, and inspiration to make a more sustainable life for himself. He offered his life story with no expectations: “People don’t normally listen,” he said, “but I can see that you care. And I can’t tell you how much that means to me."
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All he wanted was for someone to notice him. All I could repeat my head was, “he just wants love. That’s all anyone wants. My obligation is love.”
If people who suffer live with such kindness, why can’t I? One week on a service trip may initially seem like an excuse to visit a new city, but it transforms individuals and their organizations in impactful ways. Painting parking lot lines connected us instead of dividing us. Cleaning old plates for a garage sale helped us meet the people who live with an altruism that exceeds standard compassion. People with nothing offered us everything. Talking to the people who dedicate their lives to justice and to the people we served made us full by filling a city with love. The purpose of IMPACT is to serve for a week so that we can change into individuals who shape our lives with love, compassion, and labor for each other. Because service is love made visible. |