Sleepwalking

My counseling professor said a couple weeks ago that many us, he would go as far as saying that the majority of us, sleepwalk through life. I've thought about what he said ever since and I think there is a lot of truth behind it, and I would go as far as saying, especially for our generation. We are the masters of sleepwalking through life, I myself included. Going through the motions, never taking risks with our heads buried in our smart phones on Facebook.

I'm not trying to turn this into a bash on social media, although I do think there are bad and good sides to it.

The problem is for some reason, I'm not sure when, but we decided to stop taking risks along the way. I don't know if it's because we got comfortable, or what, but what I do know is we need to wake the fuck up.

Let's play again. I don't know who the fun sucker was that decided once you hit a certain age you can't play anymore. Let's take risks. Instead of saying, "Oh, I don't know..." just do it. I don't mean that for everything of course, if you think you might go to jail you probably shouldn't do it. But seriously, if you ask elderly people what they wish they did more of when they were younger, many of them say they wish they took more risks. And I don't know about you, but I don't want that to be one of my greatest regrets.

I look around my campus on my way to class, I try to keep my head up, or if I'm on my bike more alert. However, looking back at my is not a face, oh no, it's the top of people's heads. And frankly, it's starting to drive me crazy. I just want to scream, "Look at me!" What happened to the days of smiling and waving to complete strangers? Saying, "Morning" or "Good evening." Those days shouldn't be dead my friends.

I know this seems like a small trivial thing, but for me this is more than just a smile or a wave, it's about our attitudes towards one another. I think it's safe to say there is a growing lack of respect for one another. Just the other day all the students received an email about an assault in the middle of the quad. It was one against five, and from what I heard that man is still in the hospital. Let's stop the violence.

This past weekend was the Global Awareness Conference put on by one of my absolute favorite professors here, Becky Burch. The key note speaker was a man by the name of Arn Chorn-pond. Please check out this video of Arn and the author of the book about his life, Patricia McCormick.

Overall, Arn went through hell and back in his village in Cambodia and horrors we couldn't even imagine. He is a remarkable human being because he channels all he went through into his work on improving conditions in Cambodia by exposing what happened during the Khmer rouge, and trying to educate and help female prostitutes. He is also restoring the traditional music and instruments of Cambodia since so many were killed during the Khmer rouge. He has done work in America as well with gangs and educating American about Cambodia as a whole. What is truly remarkable to me is Arn's personal goal. He is trying to unite America and Cambodia through the power of music. Next year in New York City Arn will be putting on a concert with Cambodia's finest musicians called Season of Cambodia .

Even after all Arn's been through, his take home message is: love each other. Even though he saw his parents killed, his sister and brother starve to death, and systematic killing of just about everyone around him, his goal in life is to educate and restore a sense of love and respect back into this world, and to stop the violence and killing. Now this, this is the kind of attitude we should be modeling. Thank you Arn.

Let's love each other.