Organized Chaos

I came to the last meeting of our Honors class yesterday morning with a box full of supplies to be packed into the flat rate shipping boxes  I was also juggling on the walk from my car to the classroom.  When I entered the room already their were boxes waiting to be filled with the massive amount of supplies that my classmates and I had collected. One by one as we arrived we made ourselves busy in all the ways that were needed. Organizaing the supplies to fill the boxes to the brim, cutting address labels, taping the boxes and filling out custom forms.

The room was full of school supplies, our energy, and laughter as the mounds of supplies slowly began to get stuffed into the shipping boxes.  My only regret is that I was working so intently that I forgot to take pictures! I never thought we would fill so many boxes, but as my classmates brought out box after box all I could do was smile and congratulate everyone on their hard work and effort.

The boxes lined up at the Post Office. Photo Credit: Liisa Hyvarinen Temple

It was only last week that we shipped out 45 boxes to Afghanistan and this week we packed Professor Temple’s Jeep with a total of 68 boxes! I could not believe the amount that we accomplished in one week – well after a semester of work building up to it that is. Everyone had smiles on and I could feel the difference in the atmosphere.

There were times in during our Monday morning class sessions that the air in the Honors College classroom was filled with fear and anxiety. We would get let down by something that did not live up to our expectation, we would worry that we wouldn’t live up to our own expectations.  But yesterday there was no worry, no anxiety, no fear.

We talked about what we had learned throughout the semester and summed up all the lessons into one word – persistence. During the semester there was no giving, no letting ourselves or each other get down. We had to keep going, and our persistence lived on down to fitting the 68^th box into the back of our Professor’s car like the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle that we would never forget completing.

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