Late Night Tip.

Some of the biggest lessons of my life were never remotely taught in the classroom. You can’t teach life experience, you’ve got to live it✌🏽

Yes, this was the Facebook status I concocted upon getting home tonight…. but there’s more to the story.

On my drive home at 3am tonight, I began thinking about all the people I drove to the bars, from the bars, to house parties, to video game releases at midnight etc and my wheels began to turn.

Just a few weeks ago, I began driving for Lyft as a part-time gig. With grad school fastly approaching, a wedding to plan, life, etc, I thought, “Why the hell not?” Either I’m out and about, spending money I don’t need to spend at the moment or at home.

I’ve met people from all walks of life, mainly college age folks on these drives. We’ve discussed majors, minors, failed midterms, frat boy problems, literally a mix of everything. I always find myself saying things like “Don’t sweat the small stuff”,  “Enjoy your college years”, “You literally have the rest of your life to have a big girl or big boy job, seriously live it up”, etc. The moments after these exchanges I always question to myself, “When in the hell did I get so old?”

Truth be told, I’ve been in school on and off for the last 22 years. That’s a long fucking time. And frankly, I’m incredibly tired of going to school. Just in general. At this point you may be wondering, “well you should have just gone straight through”. Yeah okay. At a minimum, if you just go from Kindergarten to graduating with your bachelors degree, that’s 17 years. It’s longer if you add 2 years of preschool as well as any grad or post grad school. From there, then what? You work until you’re basically too old to enjoy your retirement. As a realist, bare with me, this will be most people. The classes I just finished to wrap up my undergrad, I’ve been physically doing those assignments in the workforce the past 5 years or so. Yet here I was, writing papers about nonexistent businesses, building up proposals and plans for a grade rather than actual pay like I had been accustom too. All for that little piece of paper (my bachelor’s degree).

Some days it feels as though we put too much stock in formal education and not enough it a little thing called life experience. (This is coming from the woman getting ready to go to grad school even.) Living in itself is learning. There’s so much to be learned from reading, from doing, from conversing with other people with different perspectives from you, from traveling, etc. There’s so much knowledge to be gained from little things known to be called life experiences. There’s so much to be learned from life itself outside the classroom, if we’re just receptive to all that surrounds us. Embrace it. You have your entire life ahead of you. Take time to explore and marvel, to learn and to grow. You’ll later come to find they were some of the best days of your life.

Renaissance Concourse Atlanta Airport Hotel- Atlanta, Georgia