Let me set the scene. It's the last night of winter break. College students have poured out of their homes with bags stuffed with new goodies from Christmas into their school living quarters. There's the jumbled hugs of excitement and chatter of being reunited with friends as campus seems to have come back alive. I just finished getting ready for the first day of classes tomorrow as I'm sure other students did. With notebooks ready to go I reflected on what my break actually entailed as I know that will become the next go to question for a few weeks.

For the past five weeks of Christmas break I was creative and used my time to learn. On the floor beside me is the making of the fifth tshirt quilt I will have made and the second of which from this break alone. I spent my afternoon teaching myself spanish as I have almost everyday since getting Rosetta Stone for Christmas. I practice yoga, read my Bible and a "for fun" book (currently on the 5th Harry Potter), would practice hand lettering, and pushed my boundaries in the kitchen by cooking a new recipe all of which I would do daily. I felt this hunger to no longer have the excuse to say I was bored and wanted to push my own boundaries outside of the classroom.

Ask yourself, when is the last time you learned a new skill or tried something new? Not only that, but when was the last time you put in grit during that time of practice? Grit: the passion and perseverance for long term goal. I heard on a podcast grit is when you work furiously hard with an obsessive love for a very narrow domain with the highest level of practice - deliberate. When I took the time out of my life to learn these skills I was not doing so as a "New Years Resolution" or to cross an item off my bucket list. I did so because I am a human with the will and ability to learn which we take for granted. I know I have more to offer than what I can recite out of a textbook but rather I have the grit to make the choice to sit down daily in an effort to learn what is beyond the four walls of a classroom.

Here's what I like to call the Grit Challenge. I am constantly baffled when people say they always wished they had learned another language or could read more or the list goes on. Consider the time you take to watch television daily or scroll through social media on your phone. Now think of something you always wish you could have learned whether it's taking dance lessons, computer coding or what have you find out where and how you can learn it. You have officially started Day 1 of your Grit Challenge. See how many days in a week you can go deliberately practicing and being mindful about how much passion you feel during it; if it becomes a chore you are no longer having true grit because it needs to be an obsessive passion of sorts. Does it light up your soul and make you feel fulfilled? That is where the magic begins.

It doesn't matter if you are 20, 89, 52, bedridden, a single mother/father, a blue collar worker with no college education. What truly matters is the will and knowledge that we all have a purpose on this earth rather than just getting up, going to work to make money, and go back to bed each day. This world is too beautiful and we are too gifted to let a single cell of our minds go to waste.