Program: Spirituality Discussion

November 19th, 2014

One of my favorite programs of November came just a couple nights before we took off for Thanksgiving break.  I (Steven) led a spirituality discussion with a couple of other hall-mates.  In all honesty, it was something I was a bit nervous about, and that was.. well that was for a couple of reasons.  First, I was nervous about whether I'd ask the right questions, which was really a pretty silly concern- because what I found was that no matter what questions I had prepared, someone else (or myself) probably had a better question stored in their head anyway that just needed the right kind of discussion and thinking to unlock it.  So there we sat, talking for what I thought might be a twenty or twenty-five minute program.  We just got so immersed in the discussion, however, that before we knew it an hour had gone by, even an hour and fifteen minutes.  It was such an incredible discussion we had: we each gave personal thoughts about what spirituality and religion (or lack thereof) meant to us, how we perceived it, what our families taught us, and what we actually do about it or how we deal with it.  We talked about more than just spirituality though.  We went on to explore morality, and how we thought our families' raising of us shaped us to who we are today.  We talked about internal joys and fears, and how we thought we'd changed since our freshman year or even from the previous year of high school.

It's conversations like these that really help one to re-realize what an amazing group of people he is surrounded with at NCSSM, and on First Hunt.  In the spirit of Thanksgiving, one of the things that I am most thankful for at NCSSM is that I have the ability to talk to someone else about this- any person, any time, and they will almost always give me a very meaningful answer.  It's a connection that I never really had with any of my friends before coming here, as I'm sure it is for lots of other NCSSM students.  One of the reasons I am happiest I came to NCSSM is for conversations like that spirituality discussion.  I look forward to many more.