During my time as a senior, I have thought a lot about how many life lessons I have discovered and grown from here during my time in college. Even though people say that college is the best four years of your life, this does not mean that you will not experience hardship while you are here. Whatever form this hardship may come in, it ultimately serves you by helping you learn and develop. By being faced with certain problems during my time here, I have learned the most and least effective ways to deal with them. Here, I plan to share with you a bit of the wisdom I feel I have acquired and hope that some of you may even learn from my mistakes.
I have discovered that aside from major events, the majority of the things that stress us out in life are reoccurring issues. Therefore, we should not be surprised or so taken aback when these same things keep happening over and over. For example, maybe a certain frenemy makes the same rude or hurtful comments to you on a weekly basis. Perhaps your classmate constantly seems to make patronizing remarks towards you in order to make herself feel better. Or maybe it is even your roommate who is disrespectful towards you all the time, but acts fake nice towards your friends. When faced with similar types of issues in the past, I found myself being equally annoyed and stressed out by them each new time that they occurred. I would complain to my family or friends and say “UGH, you’ll never guess what _____ did now”! Well actually, they probably could very easily have guessed what I was about to complain about. While it is very common to fall into this pattern of complaining about the same things over and over, this is a habit that we all need to break. Myself included. This is where the problem lies- not in the problem itself, but in how we choose to react to and handle it.
I like to think of this common, yet poor way to handle life’s problems as the “sky is falling” approach. We get unnecessarily stressed, angry over, and consumed by a problem that we essentially knew was going to occur in the first place. It is one of the easiest ways to continuously stress yourself out more than is necessary, because it becomes so routine that we let this behavior continue. I know that I am not the only one who falls into this poor habit, as I have experienced my friends, family members, and classmates doing the same thing. It took me a while to identify this problem in myself and finally take control of a certain negative situation that had previously been controlling me. Where I should have had control over my reactions, I would crumble in the presence of an event which I could have predicted would happen. I allowed myself to get sucked into the cycle of constant complaining and made myself out to be a victim in this situation. I decided that enough was enough and if the problem itself was not going to stop, then I had to change my reaction to it.
I first had to break this cycle of being constantly annoyed and even surprised that a certain situation kept perpetuating. It was not until then that I discovered that we all need to learn what types of behaviors and influences to expect from certain people in our lives. Now I am not advising to completely label people or believe that they can never change. However, it is smart to identify reoccurring patterns and distance yourself from the people or things that are a continuous negative presence in your life. For the most part, the people in our lives become more or less predictable. We know that if they do something once, odds are that they will most likely do it again. Therefore, if someone is known for making hurtful comments towards you, it should not come as a surprise if they continue to be a negative presence in your life. Even though we sometimes do not have total control over the people we are surrounded by; we do have the ability to determine what kind of role they will play in our lives. A situation or person who has hurt you can both define and confine you or they can serve as a lesson in which you grow from. The ability to make this decision is a certain power that we hold that cannot be taken away.
The second truly important lesson I have discovered in life is to learn to tell the difference between things that you have control over and things that you do not have control over. This is something that I can credit to both of my parents and am eternally grateful for this advice. Put into practice, this lesson goes like this- When faced with a problem that is causing you stress, you must first ask yourself if there is anything that you can do to control or change the situation. If the answer is yes (and it is a reasonable and mature possibility at a solution), then by all means attempt to make a change. However, if you are unable to change your situation, the next step is to change how you react to it instead. After all, the majority of the reason we get stressed out or bothered by something is due to our reaction to a problem and not the actual issue itself. Instead of choosing to play the victim in certain situations, take control of your reactions and learn to let things go.
So let’s do a good old Sparknotes style review of these life lessons. The sky is not falling! In life, you will often be faced with people or situations that continuously bring you stress and trouble. Be mature enough to expect this behavior and prepare your reactions in advance. Pray that God will give you perspective on the things that frustrate you and help you to keep your cool in the face of drama. Learn to know the difference between the problems that you have control over and those that you do not. If you have the ability to change a situation, by all means make necessary changes that will result in your ultimate happiness. However, if you cannot change a situation, understand that you can change how you react to this problem. Remember- your power and peace lie in the fact that you are always in control of your reactions to any situation in life. Once you realize this, the sky won’t seem like it’s falling, you will no longer be the victim in your life, and your stress will melt away.