Setting Sail ⛵️
Hi friends! Welcome to Full Stop, my daily attempt to live with outward honesty: to speak in truths, to learn, and to examine life. Thank you for your presence here.
☔️ Rainy Day Reset
Grateful for the overcast sky and showers that water the Main Green grass, which will soon be trampled by 14,000 people for Campus Dance this Friday.
It's an opportune time to slow down during an overstimulating week filled with dancing, toasts, fun, goodbyes, and tears.
Toggling between reflection and presence, today is an opportunity to tip the seesaw toward the former.
🧠 Surrender
I have a tendency to compartmentalize life—education, relationships, work, health, etc.—into distinct boxes with distinct problems.
I would consider how these problems require different solutions, different approaches, and different amounts of time to allocate.
This way of thinking has enhanced my productivity but has also made me more robotic than human.
However, these seemingly distinct categories are rivers that flow into one body of water: the ocean of human experience.
In love, we experience uncertainty, imperfection, and doubt.
In our careers, we feel the same—there is no telling what the “right” path is, whether becoming a physician is “better” than becoming a researcher, professor, or entrepreneur.
We constantly search for what we “should” be doing, as though a right answer exists.
For me, this is a slippery slope that leads to dissatisfaction, striving toward a reality that obstructs the beautiful presence before me.
When I first started reading about ancient Eastern philosophies, the notion of “surrendering” was repeatedly stated.
According to the Buddhist tradition, surrender means letting go of desire and giving way to experience in whatever form it comes.
I am reminded of this word and the meanings it carries as I enter uncertainty and all of its upsides—in career, life, and love.
An underlying message behind Full Stop. is to dismantle professionalism and the barricades it creates for honest connection—to lean into the real, the vulnerable, and the underlying human experience.
Surrendering is an act of courage—you are setting out on a voyage, building the ship that you sail upon, while the journey is underway.
Building the ship as you’re sailing, leaning into uncertainty—of career, future, relationships… life.
💜 Set Sail, Unapologetically
Pull from the categories of life; the lessons we glean from one silo may indeed transfer to another.
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I appreciate you 💜
I am 22, and I have no absolute certainty about where my life trajectory is taking me, whether it be in medicine, entrepreneurship, a combination of the two, or neither. Welcome to my process of discovery. Thank you for letting me learn on this journey. I hope you can too.