4-25-22
Moreau
Capstone Integration

To Know the World

	My personal mission statement in the search for a life well lived throughout life is to understand as much as possible about people and how they live. To “understand” to me means that I know why they do things they do, think things they think, and like things they like. I do not simply want to know the facts of people’s lives, I want to know where they draw meaning from and how they decide that. By not only knowing but understanding how people in many different situations think I will be able to develop my own beliefs in a fully formed sense.
	The first step to understanding things and people is to understand yourself. With the incredibly busy life that I live as a student at a very competitive university, I do not often have time to just think about myself and my own beliefs. Before I can even begin to comprehend how others live, I must understand fully why I do what I do and why I think like I think. In week one we read an article that said, “The need for an empty space, a pause, is something we have all felt in our bones; it’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape.”(“Why We Need to Slow Down Our Lives” by Pico Lyer - Moreau FYE Week One). This quote really sits with me because I feel like I would feel much better about how I make decisions if I took more time to think about why I truly make them.
	With my decision to find myself I will hopefully find the questions that I must be asking myself in order to live a life well lived. The first will be to find what actually constitutes a good life. Through my mission of understanding people I hope to find their sources for joy in order to see if they work for me. I have often thought of my life in terms of overall levels of net happiness. The more happiness I feel, the better my life is. This however was changed when I read, “Happiness changes from moment to moment, day to day. Joy, on the other hand, is much deeper and much more central, it comes from within, and it’s a genuine rightness of how one lives one’s life”(“Three Key Questions” by Fr. Michael Himes - Moreau FYE Week Two). It is very important to me that I find a deeper happiness in deep joy. I want to find a cause for myself that will keep me occupied and fulfilled throughout my life and not just entertain me from moment to moment with happiness. 
	On my path to achieving a life well lived I will of course face many obstacles and have to rely on people for help. Family for me is the place where I always turn first which is why week five was such a good experience for me. I decided to call my dad to talk to him about what advice he had for me and that really helped. The main thing that stuck out to me was that he said that I always had trouble applying myself to extend past expectations. I have always been one to achieve at a high level, but the effort that it takes to excel was always something that I struggled with putting in. This is something that I of course have always known about myself and have been told before, but as I am growing older I have found that I do have to push myself further to truly excel and work towards that goal every day.
	In this pursuit of joy and the challenge of obstacles I will have to use my time of self reflection well in order to get past them. This begs the question of how to use that time well. “We can spend endless amounts of time in self-reflection but emerge with no more self-insight than when we started.”(“The Right Way to Be Introspective” by Tasha Eurich - Moreau FYE Week Six). This quote really puts into words how you have to be very deliberate in the way that you spend your time if you truly want to live a fulfilling and good life. I can not just do things to do them in my pursuit, everything must be intentional and deliberate.
	Finally I must learn how to respond to suffering: both my own and others’. Suffering is inevitable in life and as a great man once said, “It’s not about how hard you get hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and get back up.” When dealing with suffering I want to have the same unrelenting and shameless attitude toward fixing it as Steve Refenberg who said, “I exuded an earnestness that was enormously well-intentioned; in retrospect, embarrassingly so.”(“Teaching Accompaniment: A Learning Journey Together” by Steve Reifenberg - Moreau FYE Week Nine). This sort of excitement for the cause that he is working on is honestly incredible. It is so impressive that he was able to just shamelessly follow his cause and do whatever it took to accomplish it. This is the kind of attitude that I want to have towards changing the world for the better.
	Throughout my life, and on my journey towards a good life, if I put together all of these aspects I believe that my chances of success are very high. With time set aside for myself, an understanding of how to use that time, my family around me to support me, and a shameless devotion to making the world a better place I will be set up well for living a good life. Throughout moreau this semester I have had the privilege to read about and discuss many of the topics that will be genuinely important to making my life worthwhile and deeply meaningful. While sometimes it did not feel like the applicable topics in terms of career success, looking back on the semester I have actually been prompted a lot to think about these issues and really contemplate my views.