Dedication

When I think of the word dedication, I immediately think of the gym and all the people with perfectly sculpted bodies that I see there. When I see a woman with abs or toned arms and legs, I immediately think of all the hard work she must put into keeping fit, and I yearn to have her dedication. Keeping fit is a particularly striking thing to be dedicated to because it is a 24-hour job. It is easy to go the gym for one hour, but the challenge is eating healthy for the rest of the day. I know from personal experience that in order to keep fit, you have to be dedicated to it to the point where your self-control builds up enough to avoid unhealthy eating. I also know from personal experience that this is easier said than done, as my abs go from toned to not there at all at the same rate that seasons change. You also have to be devoted enough to do exercises that will make your body burn and have you feeling sore for days. The whole struggle with sculpting your body is right when your muscles gets used to a certain rigor, you have to move on and more weights or speed. This can get frustrating but also rewarding as you see your own progress.

Looking after your body is worthy of dedication because there are only positive outcomes from it. It is common knowledge that regular exercise and healthy eating helps to stabilize moods, boost energy, combat diseases, and promote better sleeps. Also, people who exercise regularly and eat healthy tend to feel more satisfied with themselves. Looking after your body is only a single example of what is worthy of dedication. Broadly speaking, anything that harvests benefits is worthy of dedication, whether it is dedication to studying for intelligence, or dedication to meditation for spiritual fulfillment.

I have been dedicated to all the things I have listed so far, and many more. My dedication to keeping fit is probably the most important to me because feeling healthy keeps me going. Exercising makes me feel happy and accomplished, and eating the right foods keeps me from feeling lethargic. I try to go to the gym at least 5 times a weeks and to eat balanced meals everyday. Of course, dedication is a difficult thing to keep all the time, and I will often feel too lazy to exercise or cave and eat unhealthy for extended periods of time. But part of dedication is to never give up and always bounce back.

”Present Time!”

I was a child who received many gifts from my older sister. They were not necessarily the best gifts, in fact, looking back at them now, I realize they were pretty bad, but they made me happy nonetheless. My sister and I had actually made a tradition out of gift giving; we referred to it as “present time”. Like most little kids, I was extremely self-indulged and the gift giving process was mostly one-directional; my sister gave me random items and I would just smile and jump up and down with an occasional thank you. The cues for present time were always the same; I knew that if my sister’s hands were being held behind her back when she walked into my room, it was time. My face would light up like it was Christmas morning and my sister would always say the words “present time”, stretching out each syllable for a very long time.

I treasured every item she gave me because she was my idol, and I wanted all her things all the time. The items she gave me though, were literally garbage. It was all the stuff that she was planning to throw out, but decided to give me instead. Examples would include unsticky stickers, smelly markers that no longer smelled like anything, and jewelry that was simply heinous. I recall one ring she gave me that is so unfashionable that we still laugh about it now. It sits at the bottom of my jewelry box just for laughing purposes. The ring came with a purchase of another item at a one of those tacky accessory stores for preteens. My fingers were on the chubbier side, so the ring was too small to fit. My mom kept insisting that I just throw the ring out, she even told me my sister was just going to throw it out herself, but I did not care. I wanted the ring so badly that I took a hammer and I smashed the bottom half of the ring off, creating an oval that wrapped halfway around my finger and, luckily, stayed on. I wore this embarrassing, broken ring with pride for a year.

As I got older, present time came to halt. I started to catch on to the silliness of the some of the gifts and I no longer wanted them. My face did not light up anymore, and my sister decided to stop coming into my room with them. I realize now that the only reason she loved giving me these gifts was to see my face light up the way it did. Although these gifts were “bad”, as in bad quality, they did what they were meant to. They made me happy.  So, I would label these bad quality gifts as great gifts. That is what separates a bad gift from a good gift; if the gift brings happiness to the person giving and receiving it, then it’s good, if it doesn’t then it’s bad. Monetary value and other materialistic qualities should not matter. Similarly, the greatest gift is just one that brings happiness.

Rebellion

Rebellion is something that almost all teenagers go through at one point in their life. In retrospect, I can now see that the stricter my parents were with me, the more rebellious I was. As I became older and my parents became more lenient with my independence, I noticed that I was actually following their rules more willingly and closely.

During my sophomore year in high school, I highly disagreed with my parent’s parenting methods and considered running away many times. My parents were never the overly strict suffocating parents, but I had a few friends who had no rules at all and I envied them. Curfew was a main issue; my friends could stay out as late as they wanted, but I always had to take home the “cab-ride of shame” early on in the night. I wanted to run away for a few days to go live at my friend’s house, and we talked about it all the time like it was a legitimate plan. In the back of our minds, we knew I was not going anywhere. But the notion of it still excited us. That is about as close as I have ever gotten to running away.

Although I did not run away, I still rebelled in various other ways. Looking back on my actions now, I am shocked at how senseless some of the stuff I did was. In order to rebel against my early curfew, I would wait until my parents would fall asleep and then quietly sneak back out of my apartment. By the middle of my junior year, my parents actually gave me the freedom to come home whenever I pleased, and I started spending more time at home than out. Knowing I had the freedom to stay out late made it less exciting to stay out, and I would often end up coming home in time for my old curfew. Now, I laugh at my younger self and how ridiculous it is that I snuck out for what seems to be no reason at all. Another thing I would do, that I am even less proud of, is I would use a phone application that changes my caller id to make it say that I am back at a friend’s house. So I would go into a Barnes and Nobles, or some sort of quiet place, and I would phone my parents from in there and tell them that I’m back and staying in for the rest of the night. Meanwhile, I would only be on my way to starting my night. This sort of deceitfulness was all part of my “rebellious stage”, and I am glad to say that none of this occurs any longer. My parents have still yet to find out that I used to do these things, and I think that maybe one day I will build up the courage to tell them.

As for rebellious people in my life, my older sister, when she was a sophomore, was every bit as much of a rebel as I was. Many of the methods I used to rebel against my parents rules I actually picked up from her. In her case as well, though, my parents loosened up and my sister became less prone to want to break rules. 

Business

Ever since I was a little girl, my dad would bring my family on business trips a few times a year and these trips would be our vacations. My dad is the owner of a small-scale jewelry company and works mostly with private clients all around the world. I have been able to reap the benefits of the traveling that comes along with his job; I have been to five continents and experienced all different types of cultures while observing my dad run his business. My trips to Australia and Thailand were two especially memorable experiences.

When my dad developed an interest in the pearl market, he took us all to a remote island off the coast of Australia to visit a pearl farm. We went behind the scenes to watch how pearls are cultivated, and then afterwards to the company’s workshop to see how they are sorted and sold. Our last stop was in the company store. After messing around with boxes filled with hundreds of pearls, I almost forgot how valuable they actual are. I walked around the upscale store looking at dazzling pieces behind glass worth at least a couple thousand dollars. The company is one of the biggest pearl company’s the world, and it was a unique experience to see this business in motion.

When I was thirteen, my dad also became acquainted with a couple that lives in Bangkok, Thailand, and soon enough we were all packing our bags for Asia to meet with these potential business partners. The experiences I had in Thailand changed my notions of business and economy all together. Before the trip, I could only picture the inner workings of an ostensibly fair capitalist society in the United States. What I saw in Thailand was eye opening. At the time, Thailand was in a deep economic slump and its people were on the verge of breaking out in riots to overthrow the government. One of the few industries still treading above water was the jewelry industry. Due to this, the fortunate people participating in this industry were disproportionately wealthy compared to the rest of the population. My dad’s business partner’s lived in a nine-floor home filled with servants, and lived the life of royalty. Yet, their business was not particularly huge and their company was not particularly well known. As a thirteen year old in Thailand, I received the premature business lesson that location is extremely important.  

I do not aspire to start my own business, but I would like to play a role in my dad’s business at some point in my life. I have acquired a taste for traveling, and I know that if I continue my dad’s work I will get to do plenty of it. While I learned many lessons about business from travel, my dad has also taught me a lot from the comfort of our home. He gave me advice, which I plan to use in the future, about how to run a good business. Firstly, a good secretary is essential. A secretary is the backbone of any company. My dad’s secretary, Jenny, organizes my dad’s schedule and holds everything together. Second, build strong bonds with other people and always stand by honesty. If you have a loyal base of supporters, then your business is much more secured. Third, never overspend. Many companies spend more money than they make in an attempt to attract the attention of customers, and then end up bankrupt. While a bad business spends superfluous amounts of money on attracting new customers, a good business first makes sure its current customers are happy.

Music

Music has always been like a best friend to me. It will always be there for me, whether I am upset, happy, angry or just bored and looking to pass the time. No matter what mood I am in, my music will readily play what I want to hear in that mood. Since the kind of music I want to listen to changes depending on my mood, I have learned to like a broad spectrum of genres. Even genres such as country and metal, which I had previously completely ruled out, have joined the ranks of my playlists.

I first got really into music in 8^th grade. I have a sister who is four years older than me, and back in the day I used to copy everything she did. One day, I went into her room when she was not home, and I copied down every song she had in her playlists. I went back to my room, spent hours downloading them, and listened to each one. Thanks to my sister, I fell in love with music that day. The genres I liked the most at that time are still my favorites now. They included electronic, rap, and alternative. Electronic music could accompany any of my moods, while alternative music has always been reserved for when I am feeling particularly mellow. On the other hand, rap music always pumps me up. Something about the base line and the confident lyrics behind many rap songs boosts my own confidence.

Just as Swann had a transcendent experience with music in Marcel Proust’s Swanns Way, I have made deep connections with certain songs. One of the best nights of my life was New Years Eve two years ago, which I spent at a Swedish House Mafia concert. One particular moment, which spanned about 30 seconds, is so fresh in my mind that I almost bring myself back to the concert when I think about it. I was standing in the back attempting to buy a drink, when the bartender told me that they were not serving drinks at that time. I was confused until I turned around to see a giant timer counting down from 20 seconds on the stage’s screen. As the timer went down, Swedish House Mafia began to ease into their most famous song, called One. My friends and I all started jumping up and down screaming, anticipating the timer to hit zero. The moment it did, the song’s base dropped and the energy in the concert hall exploded. The memory of the sheer happiness and excitement I was experiencing during that song has stuck with me for years. Every time I hear One, I go back to that moment when it was dropped at the concert and I instantaneously feel happy and excited.

The way that listening to One brings me back to my state of mind on New Year’s Eve shows that music can have significant affects on people. There could be a multitude of reasons for this, but I believe that music can do this because of the way our mind processes it. When listening to a song, most often someone will be doing something else simultaneously. Our mind will then associate that song, or a certain part of it, with whatever else was going on when it was playing. The music therefore becomes a retrieval cue, a sort of external stimulus that is associated with stored information in our mind. Whether or not the person is consciously aware of it, this association could last for years. 

Nerves and Anxiety

I have always been an anxious person. I tend to get racing thoughts and have trouble sleeping, a lot of the time for no apparent reason. I was finally diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder at the beginning of 10^th grade. After meeting with a psychiatrist for two years, we created ways in which I could cope with my anxiety.

First, we had to figure out what it was that made me anxious. I was surprised to discover that small things in my life affect me more than I knew. Most of these things are not that unique and make many people anxious, but the only difference for me is that my genetic makeup makes me unable to deal with the anxiety that arises from them. Among these things are the tidiness of my room, test taking, and loud noises when I am trying to focus. The anxiety that I feel from these things can be overwhelming sometimes. I always notice when it hits me because I start to feel nauseous and dizzy, and it feels as if a cold shutter is running through my body. Then I tend to get shaky, and pick at my nails. Once identifying the sources of my anxiety, we moved on.

Next, we worked on coping strategies. I had to figure out how to prevent situations that made me anxious, and learn to cope with them in case they did happen. The tidiness of my room was an easy one until I got to college. Maintaining a clean room is tough when my living space, bathroom, bedroom and kitchen are all in a tiny square. On top of that, I share this square with a roommate who says that “things affect us differently” when I confront her about her messiness. As for test taking and loud noises, there is no way of preventing that, so I had to learn to cope quickly.

No coping strategy is perfect and these strategies are all different for everybody, but over the past few years, I have been able to figure out what works for me. I practice yoga as much as possible in order to relieve physical tension through stretching and mental tension through meditation and breathing exercises. I have also taught myself to reevaluate a situation when it makes me nervous. Anxiety stems from a feeling of lack of control, so when a situation makes me anxious it is because I feel like I am not holding any control over it. For example, if I notice my room is too messy and start to feel anxious, I pause for a moment and reevaluate the situation. I assure myself that the mess is not a huge deal and I can clean it, giving myself control over it. This control then makes my anxiety subside. When it comes to test taking, in order to feel in control I just have to make sure I am well studied and well rested. Procrastinating always causes me to feel nervous, so I try to avoid that. I have not yet figured out how to deal with my problem with loud noises other than to just relocate myself.

While my Generalized Anxiety Disorder is caused by a physical chemical imbalance within me that I cannot change, I have learned that it is something that can be mentally overcome through my coping strategies. The disorder may be something that I have for the rest of my life, but that does not mean that I have to let it affect me. As I hone my coping strategies over the next few years, I know that it will only get easier to deal with. 

Sleep

Getting enough sleep is very high on my priorities list, but a lot of the time that is not very easy to do. I average around 5 hours of sleep on weekdays, and on weekends I wake up too early regardless of how late I go to bed. I have spent a long time trying to figure out where my mild insomnia comes from and have concluded that it has a lot to do with stress factors in my life. As a student, I feel a lot of pressure to do well in school, maintain a social life, and get enough exercise. Fitting sleep into my busy routine gets quite difficult.

If I am extremely exhausted, then occasionally I will be able to take an afternoon nap. These naps occur when I have only had 2-3 hour of sleep and my body’s physical need for rest overpowers any anxiety that would have stopped me from falling asleep. Often times I have a variation of the same dream during these afternoon naps. These dreams are characterized as “anxiety dreams”, and they are unique to my afternoon naps; I never get them at night.

They start out with me in some sort of social situation, surrounded by at least one person that has been relevant to me in the past few days. The setting of the dream always varies, and the people often do to, but the situation is the same. I am in the middle of doing something or talking to someone, when suddenly I feel like I am falling asleep. My eyes slowly begin to flutter closed despite my efforts to keep them open. Then my motor functions begin to fail, and that is when I start to panic within the dream. I notice that I am having trouble standing, and that I am losing control over my entire body. From here, the dream is always the same. I tell whomever I am with that something is wrong, and that I need help. Instead of helping me, the person continues with what they are doing, taking no notice of what is happening to me. Despite my pleas, I keep being ignored and then I go into a paralysis where I lose my ability to move or speak. If I was standing up in the dream, I just fall down right where I am standing. Then, in my dream I keep telling myself something along the lines of “Sasha, you need to wake up, do not pass out right now”. I repeat this over and over again until I manage to wake myself up in real life. It is as if my unconscious manages to directly communicate with me through my dream.

This awakening is always very harsh; I am panicked and my heart rate is so fast it hurts. I feel more tired than before and I almost feel scared. These anxiety dreams are a common occurrence for me; I actually had one earlier today. I was doing my history reading and I felt like resting my head for a moment. Then, unintentionally, I fell asleep and entered the dream world. In my dream, my roommate and I are in our room and she is jumping up and down telling me how excited she is to go out. I try to act excited with her, but my body feels as if it is shutting down. My roommate does not notice this and grabs my hands in excitement. I try to tell her that “something is very wrong with me”, but I can barely speak. My eyes are closing but somehow she still takes no notice of my worsening state. I tell her to call an ambulance as I start to pass out, and then in real life I open my eyes to see my roommate coming into the room and calling my name. I then realize how ridiculous I must have looked lying face down on the floor, asleep at 4pm.

I know that these dreams must have something to do with me feeling guilty about taking an afternoon nap, since as I mentioned before, I am very busy all the time. I have concluded that my anxiety problems are the cause of this guilt, and hopefully when I learn to keep my anxiety fully at bay, the dreams will go away. 

Vocation

Vocation is something that does exist, and every person has at least one vocation, but it is that person’s job to find it and to flourish it. If left unexplored, a vocation’s potential to progress into something more than just a “calling” will whither away.

For example, my parents always believed that I had a vocation for tennis. I started at the age of three, and practiced on a weekly basis for many years, up until 7^th grade. I was one of those precocious children who could hold a tennis racket larger than the size of my body and play people much older than I. My parents never pushed me to try to do anything with this skill, and I slowly began playing less and less. Eventually, I was bored and moved on to many other sports that I was not very good at it. Now, it has been years since I have taken any lessons in tennis and I would probably be embarrassed to see myself play somebody. It just goes to show that although I had a certain knack for playing this sport, which could be traced back to my genes, this knack was not enough to keep me a skilled tennis player after I stopped practicing.

 The point of that story was to show that vocation is not everything. I believe that even if someone does not have a vocation towards something, or is not genetically wired to be good at it, if they work at it they can achieve. I am sure there are people out there who initially were awful at tennis, but now could beat me in a match with ease. It is really all about practice.

There also comes into play the challenge of finding your vocation. Undiscovered potential lies in everybody, and that is unfortunate because it is a waste of talent. College seems to be a great place to discover new vocations, and it is never to late to find a new calling. Maybe I will run into something else that I am naturally gifted at in the next four years.

An example of someone I know who exhibits a strong calling and has mapped out its potential is my family friend Dmitri. His entire family has proven to have very business oriented minds, and his parents are both very successful. Starting at the age of 9, Dmitri stepped in their shoes and began developing ideas for small business ventures of his own. By the time he was 13 years old, he had some viable ideas that his parents agreed to fund. At the age of 15, Dmitri ended up making a generous profit over the creation of some iPhone applications. When he told me of this story, I could not help but be extremely impressed. At one point in their lives, I am sure many people have sat down and tried, for at least a moment, to think of a new iPhone application to make millions off. I guess not all of us have the vocation for it like Dmitri. 

Family and Relatives

Growing up, my relatives have influenced me a considerable amount. My entire family, immediate and extended, emigrated from Russia to the United States in the early 1980s. The effects my family’s Russian culture has had on me are becoming more clear to me as I get older. Each relative influences me in their own way, and ultimately our shared culture only brings us closer together. To start, there are my grandparents. While my parents have created a more relaxed, American-style environment in my upbringing, my grandma continuously exposed to me old values and made sure I understood my culture quite thoroughly. My grandma is what one would imagine as the classic Russian “babushka”. When I was young, every day she would pick me up after school and take me to her home to prepare a Russian lunch for me. During the few hours I spent with her, she would tell me about her life in Russia and show me VHS tapes she has of old Russian cartoons. Those cartoons became all I enjoyed watching, and I often felt uncomfortable or left out in school when kids would talk about their American shows. Occasionally, I still look back at YouTube clips of the shows for the sake of nostalgia, just as any other American child looks back on shows from their childhood that were cut off the television network. I also still look back on all the Russian food I was served, and how much I had always loved it as a little kid. My taste buds are probably even a little bit different because of it; I have an unusual appreciation for pickled foods.

Then comes the influence of my highly superstitious grandpa. Russian superstitions are very singular, and explaining them to my friends has always been a feat that ends in frustration and confusion. I try to ignore these superstitions because I almost find them to be silly and groundless, but in the back of my mind, there is always something telling me they should be followed. Among them is the rule that whistling and wealth are somehow related. I remember in Elementary School that I never had the ability whistle like some of the other kids. I felt left out and so I practiced for days on end until I got it down. I happily skipped up to my grandpa to show him the new skill I had learned, and all I got from him was a stone cold frown. He told me that only beggars whistle and if I continued doing it, I would one day be a beggar. Now that I am older, I know that it is possible to statistically prove there is no correlation between whistling and being a beggar, but every time I catch myself randomly whistling, I get a nagging feeling that I should stop.

Of course, my grandparents are not my only relatives that have influenced me. My very religious cousins, who live close by, have also influenced me. They exposed me to my Jewish roots, and every year bring our families together during the holiday’s. Through their persistence in getting all our extended family together for all the Jewish holidays, they have brought us all closer together. It is during these gatherings that I have learned about Judaism, and come to appreciate it, even though I still consider myself an Atheist. All together, my relatives have made me see how much religion and culture can play a role in my daily life and upbringing, and have made me value having a close-knit family even more. This in turn has caused me to be constantly conscious of maintaining a good relationship with my parents and my sister, and has embedded values and principles in me that I will most likely bring to my next family. 

Work

Hard work is putting a large amount of effort into tasks that we consider necessary for moving us forward. Work lies at the center of all our lives; everyday there is some form of work to be done, whether it is work aimed at academics or the self. Work aimed at the self would constitute being healthy, introspection, etc.

Most of the time, I only work extremely hard on my academics for the most basic reason, good grades. This is not to say I am not interested in the topics I am studying or do not enjoy learning for intrinsic rewards, but I definitely would not be forcing myself to stay up until 3am with a cup of coffee if I wasn’t trying to get a good mark. In my life, hard work has unfortunately come to be synonymous with a lack of sleep and a lack of time, and I see this in so many of my friends as well. After being under pressure for long periods of time, working for the extrinsic reward of grades can start to, ironically, seem unrewarding and not worth it.

The solution to a problem like this is to work hard at something that does not bring you good grades, but makes you feel satisfied for other reasons. This would be invigorating work rather than the punishing work that goes hand in hand with my Venti Starbucks. At the moment, I have a specific scenario in mind, which is being part of the Students for a Free Tibet organization at Emory. It is a small club, not many people know it exists, so I see it as a hidden gem with unique opportunities to get involved with Buddhism and Tibet Culture. I wish this blog entry could be about me being hard at work at this club, because the few times I have put in my time to helping out I have felt greatly rewarded by it, but this entry will acknowledge some of the other members.

At the first executive meeting, which was open to all members who wanted to be involved more, one person spoke up even more than the leaders of the club. He said he spent time in Tibet and it gave so much to him, and now he was looking to give back. This was something I could relate to, so I immediately felt like I was in a similar situation as this other member. The only difference was, he was prepared to give ten times more than me. Within a day of being a member, he had already taken the initiative of setting up a blog for the club and publicizing it on Facebook to bring in more members. I also knew he was not just doing it to be able to say he is on the executive board because he did not care whether or not he was added as an official member of the board.

In a society where most of the hard work people do is aimed at extrinsic rewards, it is always refreshing to see someone actually care. I soon came to see that a lot of people in the Students for a Free Tibet club are like that. Tibetan culture and politics is one of those unique interests that most people are not just indifferent about, either they are very passionate about it or they feel that it does not involve them. This significance of this whole experience is that I noticed that being around other people who cared made me care so much more. I started talking about the club with my friends and sent a message to the member who brought up the blog about helping him out with it. My friends were surprised to see me being so passionate about the club, as I have never expressed that much interest in any other extracurricular before. Starting to help out with club gave me a feeling of satisfaction that good grades cannot bring about; I felt invigorated. Now, twice a week, I get to meet with other people who are invigorated and let their passion and hard work rub off on me.