It's Saturday night and, unlike most people my age who are out having a good time, I'm sitting in my room hitting the books hard to get a Statistics problem set finished in time to work with one of my study groups tomorrow. Normally, I would be pretty salty about this, but I'm actually feeling good about it because I am lucky to even have the opportunity to be studying at Stanford.
I woke up at 6:30am this morning feeling rough because I'm pretty much getting run over by the academics here and, to make matters worse, I was a passenger in a car that was rear-ended twice yesterday during a 5-car chain reaction accident on US-101. I wasn't hurt badly, but I woke up aching like crazy and would have wanted nothing more than to just go back to sleep. I couldn't go back to sleep because I had to be at a community center about 10 minutes from campus to volunteer at a Special Olympics powerlifting competition through Stanford Challenge For Charity student group. I swear I didn't want to do that joint this morning, but I'd signed up for it and didn't want to fake on them. By the time I left there, I was SO GLAD that I didn't skip out on it because it was such a rewarding experience. It started off rough with me having to carry heavy weight equipment to set up the gym for the competition, but my demeanor changed once i saw the athletes. They all had different conditions, but the one thing they had in common was their enthusiasm for the event. There were about 25 competitors who had a variety of physical and mental disabilities and they were there at 8am with big smiles on their faces so I knew I couldn't be standing there looking sour. As the time for the start of the competition approached, I had a chance to talk with a young man named Aaron with down's syndrome and he was so excited to find out that I (and two of my other classmates) were from Stanford. He talked to us for about 5 minutes and, when he walked away, I couldn't help but have a big smile on my face. The competition started at 9am with the Squat contest and I was amazed at how much weight these kids could do. One young man, who had a mental handicap along with a left arm that hadn't fully developed and was shorter than the right, stepped up and squatted 220 lbs, which was twice his body weight. These kids were amazing. My classmates and I had to leave at 10am, so we didn't get to help out with the bench press and dead lift parts of the competition, but I left there feeling so proud to have been a part of it all. When I got home, I decided that I wasn't going to let myself feel down about having to study my butt off because I've been blessed with a great opportunity. If those kids could go in that gym and struggle with those weights with nothing but smiles and excitement written all over their faces, then I don't have the right to get salty about anything I've got on my plate right now. Hopefully, I'll be able to get some progress made by 1am so I can catch some z's, but, if I don't, it's all good because there's always tomorrow and I'll just have to approach that day with excitement just like those Special Olympians did earlier today.