Priorities

Today I traded in the mocha for a hot mint tea so that I could feel good about buying breakfast along with my coffee. Unfortunately, my mocha has become sort of ritual for me, telling my brain when it's time to write for the blog-world, and I'm finding that I either need to drink a mocha each time I sit down to write this blog or get myself out of the habit of drinking a mocha every time I sit down to blog. For me, this goes under the category of problems to solve another day, and I choose to make note of it and move on for now. But I couldn't help noticing that as the barista rang up my total, it was less than I normally spend on my one small mocha.

This year has really been about finding priorities. Last semester was busy and hard, and I ended up quitting one job and significantly reducing hours in another. Putting schoolwork ahead of employment is not normally the advice I would give to others, but after looking at our budget and finding that with my husband's income we would have, once again, *just enough*, I decided to spend the year focusing the majority of my energy as a student. But prioritizing isn't always easy.

I have a friend who is in a training program to become a pastor who tells me she can't do anything around the house until her homework is done (with the exception of taking care of her children when, say, they need food or a diaper change). Her husband, on the other hand, can't focus on writing a sermon or speech or making a budget until the housework is done and he can be free of distraction. They're lucky, they have it figured out. They know exactly what they need to do in order to focus and complete their tasks.

I have met students here who are killing themselves over grades. I met one girl whose philosophy is to get all of the homework done, sacrificing sleep, work, anything she can cut out of the day to get work done. She and others strive for A's and anything less is unacceptable. Of course, I can understand this, but I don't think it's any more healthy than putting everything off until the last minute and doing a minimalist job.

What I have found this year, especially after spending a year in the "real world" where you have to work hard and make a sustainable income, pay bills, etc, is that there are no A's in life. I am learning that most of the time family comes first, gainful employment is important for a sustainable lifestyle, community involvement helps more than the individual.

It's hard to find a balance in a world where everything is graded, but you can't neatly file learning, understanding, gaining of knowledge. As my colleagues and I get closer to graduation, it's harder to regurgitate exactly what the professor wants. What professors want these days is not to see how much we can remember from text books but how we apply what we learn in class to our own work, and how we develop. In the real world, we need to know how to prioritize.

Because ultimately, what we become is far more important than what we know.