College students tend to trudge through the week. We schedule our lives around tests, study groups and the next Chick-fil-A stop.
When it feels like life is crashing down, it can seem cliche to suggest gratitude as a solution to stress. Some may agree it’s hard to find things to be grateful for sometimes. Between mediocre test scores and pressuring jobs, college life seems to be one of stress, starvation and poverty.
However, there are those that are able to recognize small things that bring happiness into their everyday lives. This holiday season, after asking around on campus, we found that what many SUU students are grateful for is their peers.
“I love when people smile,” Riley Steadman, a senior psychology student from Stansbury Park, said. “When people are walking to class and they smile at me, a simple smile means the world.”
Tyler Jaros, a junior communications major from Cedar City, expressed gratitude for a simple text message. “Yesterday, I got a text from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while. It was a nice pick-me-up and made me feel good.”
Happiness, like most things, comes in all shapes and sizes–sometimes in the shape of food.
“I always am happy when my wife makes food,” Payton Christensen, a senior nutrition major from Riverton, said. “But when class gets canceled, that is even better.”
Allowing ourselves to be full of gratitude enables us to turn our hectic college life into more than just a place of stress.
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life,” Melody Beattie, an American writer, said. “It turns what we have into enough. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”
Whether you are a freshmen trying to find your place on campus or preparing to graduate, we all need to take a moment, breathe in the crisp air and, to paraphrase Johnson Oatman Jr., “count our many blessings, name them one by one and see what the world has done.”
Story By
Cassidy Harmon & Ansleigh Mikesell
Reporter2@suunews.com & Reporter3@suunews.com
