Priorities

So it's 5:30 AM on Saturday morning and I should have been asleep 3 hours ago, but sometimes I get going and motivated and don't feel much desire to sleep, exhausted as I may be. I realize as a college student I have a lot of things pulling at my attention, and that I really have no idea how to handle them. This week has been more variegated in how my motivations and priorities have shifted than most, but I still deal with it week to week. Or day to day. School is usually number one with church, but school takes a lot more time in my day than anything when I'm doing it right. But then I want to develop my hobbies. Or worry about my lacrosse team. Or find a job. Or learn new skills, like web coding/design. Or get more freelance work done. Or spend more time with friends. Or play, like rock climbing or something. Or the endless bachelor pursuit of the opposite sex. And some of these will really grab complete hold of me for days or hours and nothing can distract me, and everything gets out of whack.

First off, my church is very important to me, and I hope to always make it a foundational priority. But it doesn't require the same time demands as it did as a missionary, and school takes tons of time. I find that my classes are quite rigorous, and grad school is a must for career success. I can't leave BYU as a with a BS in biophysics and expect much to come of it. The issue is that I'm so bad at making it all happen. I work hard in school, but never hard enough. And here we get to where my thoughts started to find some unifying glue.

My mother, a wonderful woman who I do not appreciate enough, returned to BYU when I was 15 or 16 to finish her undergrad in psychology at BYU. Because I was still in high school, and a 3.8 required maybe, on a tough week, 5 or 6 hours of homework a week, I did not appreciate the rigors of college. My mom would come home from school, an hour away, often quite late at night. One time I did the math (I do love math) and it was a solid 17 hours that my mom spent on campus. This was unfathomable to a high schooler that cruised through school and got into BYU without much effort.

I'm not going to talk about my grades and how well I'm doing, but about what my mom accomplished. She had 2 kids still at home, and a husband and responsibilities that are greater than pretty much any of mine. I am single. She had been a full-time mom for over 25 years or so. And she got amazing grades. Universities in general are taxing and time-consuming; BYU is in the upper echelon of difficulty, and that's not a pride thing. Transfer students are always at least slightly surprised at how tough BYU is, and usually more so. This is not the land of easy As, it's hard work and focus. My mom did it. She got into grad school and worked her tail off, and now I get how hard it is.

So when I talk about priorities, I realize that adults make far better students than kids like me. My mom had spent over half her life as a mother by that point and probably knew from years of experience what was important for her, her family and how she raised her children. That translated to knowing how to use her time as best as she could when she was a student. She had great results. I don't feel like I know how to do that, and I'm not always dedicated enough to try. One week I can be on fire with school, getting productive study done. Other weeks are like this one - I have wasted a lot of time.

I really believe that part of being a grown-up is knowing how to value the most important parts of your life. No success with my lacrosse team is going to compensate for a poor GPA this semester. Developing relationships with people, rewarding as that may be, will not replace the hefty blessings of being faithful in my worship. There are really only 2 or 3 things at a time we can devote the full weight of our focus and attention, and we can be really good and productive at those things. But it is so easy to let the other things we are interested in or care about take us away from that. I'm a 22-year-old, and I am easily blown about by whatever catches my fancy; my mom was a rock, and she didn't stray from what she needed to do to get into grad school. And I didn't really think about that or understand until about 15 minutes ago. Practice makes perfect, and that definitely applies to how well we determine how best to use our time. Busy people get the most done, so I'll get proactive and get some sleep so I can figure out my life tomorrow. Such a challenge to be young and dealing with all of this, but that's a weak complaint.