Awake My Soul

"The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you 

Don’t go back to sleep. 

You must ask for what you really want

Don’t go back to sleep. 

People are going back and forth across the doorsill 

where the two worlds touch. 

The door is round and open

Don’t go back to sleep.”

--Rumi

It's hard to believe that I have been in the states for 9 days now. I'm still in quite a daze to say the least because of how quickly everything happened: I returned to Long Island the night of Friday, August 26 just to find out that my family and I needed to evacuate our home because of Hurricane Irene; after relocating to my grandmother's home a town over from mine on Saturday, August 27 (everything turned out fine and it was thankfully not as bad as the forecasters predicted) I drove the 3 hours to West Chester on Monday morning, moved in to my new apartment, and began classes less than 5 hours later...Whew!  What a crazy first week back; I still can't believe I'm finally back home. I'm not sure if my time went slowly or quickly, but either way it's crazy to think that just a week and a half ago, I was more than 2,000 miles away living with a Costa Rican family and speaking another language.

But because I have been wandering through these past 9 days tiredly and with an absent mind, and after taking time to reflect upon what my daily activities have consisted of since my return, I've realized that I have unfortunately fallen right back into the same bad habits I had hoped to change by altering my environment; a.e. eating unhealthy food, sleeping too much, not making time to exercise, etc. Granted, I was unaware that I had reverted back to my old habits since I've been jumping from one task to the next, but still I am now thinking to myself, "Are you kidding me? WAKE UP!" The whole point of my trip to Costa Rica was to gain new perspective and to better myself in any way possible. So how could I immediately allow myself to return to a lifestyle I desperately wanted to change?

The key here is awareness: once you have it, don't let yourself lose it. As Rumi says, stay awake with enlightenment; don't go back to sleep with ignorance. When we are lucky enough to have an experience that teaches us some lesson, we cannot allow ourselves to think that learning the lesson is enough, because it's not. We must then apply what we have learned to our lives or else all that we have learned will be lost.  

My time in Costa Rica was relatively well spent and offered me countless valuable lessons including lessons about daily living and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. I now have the opportunity to apply all that I learned to my daily life here in West Chester, PA. Why would I not seize this brilliant opportunity?...I have no answer to this question except that it's easier said than done. But that's not enough to stop me from making the quality of my life better because I know the hard work will be worth it. 

So I'm gonna go with Rumi on this one and say there will be no more sleeping for me...Life has too much to offer for me to sleep through it.