stopping to smell

I am a goal-oriented person. I am not someone who looks forward to stopping and smelling the roses. This is good for some areas of life and bad for others, as is most any personality quirk.

As I have been in school for what feels like a lifetime (neither NJ nor CD were even born yet when I started), every single semester has seen me with a narrow-minded focus of just making it to the end. Once I get to the end of a semester I usually have a few days of feeling real good about being done with the semester, then I get into a routine and don't appreciate the reduced responsibilities.

This coming week starts the second half of my last semester, so I am officially focused on surviving through the first week in May. That is not necessarily good because I have other things in my life that are more important than school, even in my last semester.

While I think that God gives us certain traits for a reason, I think that I need to learn how to appreciate living in the process more rather than only having a single-minded focus on reaching the end of the process. I need to stop and smell the roses, or whatever it is that I am supposed to smell on my journey. This probably makes more sense in other things I do in life besides education, but that is where it is relevant now. So, for the next month-and-a-half I will be making an effort to stop and smell the pencils. There aren't any roses in most classrooms.