Welcome back, everyone. Welcome back to the cold and to homework. Welcome back to pillow talks with your roommate and late nights finishing up assignments. We are once again entering a semester of b-quiv, chapel, core classes and PE classes.

Coming back from Christmas break, I always find everything is the same. Sure, we have Interim classes that are significantly more fun than normal classes (and less pressure, as many of them are pass/fail), but for the most part, Calvin still feels the same as always.

However, we are not the same. In our few short weeks of Christmas break, we have had time to stop and think, spend time with family and friends, read a book for fun or binge on Netflix. This pause from our normal routine allows us to realize all the changes we have gone through.

The Christmas season is a time of reflection. We look at the past year and find things that went right, wrong and everywhere in between. We face our first semester grades and tell our parents about our latest experiences.

This reflection provides us with an opportunity to rest our bodies and minds after a long semester.

So, what happens when we come back? January is a time of renewal. It is when our well-rested selves find the motivation to come up with improvements we hope to achieve the rest of the year. We tell ourselves we will eat healthy, go to the gym, study harder, meet new people; the list goes on and on.

Something about the start of the new year gives us courage to look at our past mistakes and decide to be better.

For some reason, however, all these high hopes seem to slide away as we settle into our old routines. I can’t tell you how many times I have sacrificed gym time for an extra hour of sleep or waited until the last minute to finish an assignment.

The renewal we feel after our break seems to fade as soon as we once again feel the stress and the exhaustion of everyday life.

This seems wrong to me.

I encourage everyone to maintain these high hopes this semester. Write them down, tell them to a friend and work them into your normal routine.

In doing so, we may just find that we become a little more like the people we want to be this year.

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson