Tips for college freshmen, relevant to you

MAKE FRIENDS. WITH PROFESSORS.

Supervisors, bosses, managers, religious leaders. Someone who has been assigned a higher rank than you. Regardless of qualifications, we’re taught to defer and do what they say. This can be intimidating.

Unfortunately, power dynamics build chasms in relationships, relationships that have the potential to dramatically influence who we are and what we become. When someone is standing on a pedestal of authority, it’s easy to forget people are people….

No one has it figured out

A large number of Nepalis work or study abroad.

Recently I found myself speaking to a young man preparing for his first year of college. He was scared as hell, understandably so, leaving behind his family and everything familiar to attend college in Louisiana. This would be the first time he traveled outside Nepal.

I was 17 when I left the cornfields of Longmont, Colorado for Manhattan’s…

The paradox of our age

I found this printed on a banner hanging in a teahouse in Nepal.

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines but less healthiness.

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet our new neighbor.

We built more computers to hold…

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Anger is fuel

“If there is no night, how can there be day?” one of the monks once asked me. Anger is a part of life. As is jealousy, sadness, rivalry, shame, disappointment.

You won’t rid your life of pain or suffering. Negative experiences are a part of it all. What you do during these moments is what matters.

You don’t have to become slave to your emotions; in fact, you can…