Monday Inspiration: June 22, 2015

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I saw the bar exam countdown calendar. Thirty-something days left. I shuddered. This is insane; the way time has run away, kidnapping our summer. For those still in law school doing internships, their internships are halfway done. It’s that time in the summer when exhaustion settles into numbness, and even Shakespeare in the Park is too long to enjoy.

Summer has officially just begun, but my mind is already escaping to one of my favorite times of the year, autumn. Too soon, I know. But with the way time is running, it will be here before we know it. Maybe all this talk of autumn and summer ending is crazy talk. Maybe. Perhaps, it’s the bar exam anxiety getting to me. Maybe it’s the fact that this is my last summer. Once one enters the working world there are no more semesters, no more summers, and no more long-long, Puerto Rican style holiday breaks… This exciting professional life will begin. A new apartment, a new routine– it will be great, but different. Anyway, what is to come will come, soon enough. Focusing on now, there is summer (which in every Floridian’s mind started before this Sunday in Florida because of the 100-degree weather May and June offered us in the Sunshine State), a slowly building tan on my olive skin, a heat that doesn’t want to let me breathe (causing me to reminisce on the summer when I first moved to Florida)… It’s one of those sunny, hot, half-naked summers in Florida with an occasional evening thunderstorm that turns steamy.

And it’s Monday, on top of all of this badinage and rambling. Monday has been a bit frustrating, tiring and anxiety-filled. I won’t lie. But here we are, at the start of a new week. Let’s make it one of fighting the fear, the exhaustion and the clock.

I am off to review flashcards in a hammock. Got to keep at it, and keep marching up my own mountain with my 70-pound books. When we climb up obstacles, maybe anxiety weighs heavier than everything else in the load. So before climbing, maybe it’s worth exchanging it for hope. Hope doesn’t weigh us down, instead it takes us higher.

Off to climb. I hope your climb this week is one that in the end makes you smile.