Kouzes ch. 7 exercises

On December 21st, 2012 [my birthday if you must know] the world is going to end.

We like to call them "freshy's" and if they survive to their second year, we call them semi- pros.

It's an audience in a well lived in, well loved room.

I call them the future.  I call me, the faint and fragile passing leaf of time.  I am no mystic.  I am no scholar.  I am no expert.  I, am only a fellow traveler.

I call them babies.

I've been on panels before- student panels.  But this one is different.  It has yet to take place.  All the other times I've done this, it didn't feel right.  I wasn't thinking clearly.  I wasn't thinking of hope.  You aren't worth much if you can't think of a life and a world without hope.  I wasn't worth much.

So I rehearse and rehearse- in my head.  And this is what came out.

This life isn't meant for everyone.  I'm not trying to discourage you.  I'm being honest.  This place is unforgiving if you don't have hope.  If you don't have fight.  If you aren't willing to exile yourselves from your loved ones, your home, your land, then you have no business being here.

Learn to love from a distance.  Learn poetry because it will help you communicate your love- one mile away or a thousand miles away, it helps make that love real.

Learn to cope.  Allow yourself to daydream- to fall in love.  To fall out of love.  practice those first lines.  practice poetry.  Learning to fall in and out of love is the beginning of any dream and it's epic-ness.

Learn to smile at people even you don't feel like it or are in too much pain.  Everybody has to be the perfect stranger at least once in their life.  You never know you could be helping to save someone's life.

If you haven't cried yourself to sleep, wept bitterly, yelled at God/ the Creator, inexhaustibly lonely,  felt piercing pain while in college- that says something about your passion and character.  It says that you aren't ready to fight, you're distracted, and that you have no business being here right now.

Men- learn to cry.  It's the manliest thing you could ever do.

Learn the art of the hug, the high five, and self depreciation, and you'll find that surviving is bearable.

This is my story.

And for now it's a good story.