Gratitude

Today I am grateful to strangers who don't have to be kind to me, but are.

It's been a hectic couple days, as I've been doing a lot of soul-searching. I haven't felt well since returning to Stanford this fall, and I've been trying to figure out why.
Two big steps I decided to take:

1. revamping my physical needs and experience in my room

2. switching my academic experience by switching my major.

1 was obvious. One thing I've noticed is that my sleep has been taking away my ability to live and work. I've repeatedly tried to work past 8 or 9pm, gotten tired, and felt unable to continue working in my apartment's kitchen. But my bedroom was such a mess that I couldn't efficiently do my work anywhere except for in bed, which is where I would become completely inefficient. So I spent 3 hours moving around my furniture, making a relaxation space under my bed, and cleaning up my desk so it could be a work-only space. Now I have a work space, a sleep space, and a relaxation space (with room left over for my bike) and immediately I felt I could work far later in the night without messing up my sleep or work quality.

But I wanted to go beyond just my room's comfort. I took a long-overdue trip to CVS. I got nice soap, nice shampoo and conditioner, a fancy straight-edge razor, febreze, shaving cream, and hair product.
Suddenly, taking a shower doesn't feel like a burden; it feels like freedom!

These two changes made a big difference. What also made a big difference was a kind lady who saw me in CVS. I was walking back and forth in front of the locked case with the razors in it, muttering to myself about what I could afford and what I couldn't, and how I hate the locked glass walls that are in all these stores now.

About ten minutes later, as I walked through a different aisle, the same woman walked up to me and handed me a CVS coupon to take 15% off my most expensive item. I was taken aback. I was even a little skeptical. Why would this woman help me get a cheaper grocery bill? She gently explained that she could only use one coupon at a time and they expired soon. I thanked her, bewildered.

As I walked through the aisles of CVS I thought about a conversation my fiancee and I have had a lot recently: the way we act toward strangers. We've found that in the internet age (and especially back home) people don't take kindly to being talked to out of nowhere. But I believe deep down that these can be some of the most fulfilling interactions. So I took the coupon and used it at checkout, happy to have had a positive moment.

Naturally, the coupon bounced.
I got a quick look at the register; I'm pretty sure the coupon was only for the woman's CVS account, and since I'd put my groceries under my mom's phone number, the computer system bounced it.

Well, them's the breaks, I thought. No harm, no foul.
But the cashier then, just for the kindness of helping me out, not only manually input a 15% coupon for that item, but found me several other items I'd picked that qualified for valid coupons, and saved me 20 dollars.
I was baffled.
I guess sometimes the universe just wants to send you a sign that people care because they are people, not because they know you.

I got back home and spent a while sprucing the place up, shaving, showering, and allowing my body to get excited about being clean and spiffing up. This made a massive difference in the way I felt about my day. Then, thanks to the kindness of the CVS people, the cleaned up room, the day going the way it could because of 20$ of kindness and moments of others' time, I had the confidence to make a massive decision:

2. I decided to switch my major.

I have been a physics major at Stanford in one way or another for nearly three full years. I have finished essentially the entire minor, spent months of my life on research, and been in a dozen physics classes and hundreds of physics department events.

It's time for a new space for me.
I realized that my goal has slowly become to graduate in geophysics and then apply for a coterminal master's degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences (Stanford's geology+ major). At a certain point, I realized, sitting there in my clean clothes and clean room--

Why am I tacking towards physics when my heart knows I want to end up in EPS?

The obvious reason is the mental block of money and prestige:

Physics allows you some amount of leeway in Silicon Valley, to get fancy jobs you're technically not qualified for. People have a strange, almost religious respect for physics majors. Oftentimes, graduates of Stanford's physics programs go to work for big tech companies or financial behemoths despite the fact they never studied more than a dot of CS or Econ.

Then there's the prestige aspect. I want my family and friends to be proud of me, to think I'm making the most of my Stanford education.

But three years later, after what feels like a lifetime of vectors, diagrams, and differential equations, I don't feel the need to prove myself to them anymore in the way I did.

I want to do right by them, that's for sure. But impress them? I know what doing my best by my family and friends is. And it's not running myself into the ground on principle when I know my place is somewhere else.

So after a day of a thousand generosities from others in the world, I emailed two EPS professors and begged them to let me switch into their classes despite the fact that it's week 3 of a 10-week quarter.

They agreed. Thank goodness. And their final two acts of generosity propelled me to a wonderful feeling of maybe, just for a moment, being prepared for what the future holds this quarter.

I'm excited.

It's been three years since I've felt so excited about college.

It's fitting that the catalyst to such a change were a series of small kindnesses that taught me what I needed today.