Missing Shoelace

So I’m a Resident Assistant in Jamestown North and we have the privilege of checking the condition of each of our residents’ rooms before they move into the dorm. The standard procedure is to fashion some sort of key ring to hold the keys for each room… my solution was a shoe lace. I unthreaded a lace from one of my running shoes and tied a knot at the end to hold the keys on the lace.  I had all my keys in order and walked through the rooms one-by-one.  The rooms seemed to be mostly fine and I took note of any damages.  I then placed the keys back on the proper hooks and was done with the task. I was finally ready to go to bed and get up early to run.

It is really hot in Williamsburg in the summer and the only thing worse than the heat is the humidity.  I get up at 6 to run before my internship starts at 8. Yeah, it kind of stinks, but the heat is way worse, so I keep on getting up. Last summer I worked at Aromas in the afternoon until close, so I could get up at 6, run for an hour and then shower and go back to sleep until noon. Those were the days of minimum wage and no a.c., but that’s beside the point. I woke up at 6 the day after I checked the rooms and remembered that I used the shoelace from my running shoes… I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it (I still can’t). I still need to run, so I unthreaded the black shoe lace to my soccer cleat and weaved it through my running shoe. It looked a little goofy with the mismatched shoelace colors, but I was fine with that… switching it up is still cool, right?  I go run, get real sweaty and come back, my usual routine.  After work, I come back and want to play some pickup ultimate frisbee with some friends, so I go into my closet and see my cleat is of course missing its shoe lace. I then go through the same process of replacing the shoe lace from my running shoe back through the cleat. I have since repeated this process throughout the past couple weeks.

After much nerdy introspection I realized that life is kinda like losing a shoelace, you lose things and shift resources from one thing and allocate it to another, and pretty soon you’re shifting resources everywhere to fill the void. You’re really only displacing the missing stuff. You only have a limited amount of resources (time), so spend it on things you love because you never know where things can go (yes, I just inserted the cheesy connection to life lessons… that just happened).  Getting into my senior year, which has become more real since my job title is “Senior Summer Interviewer,” has made me rethink how I want to spend my time. I’m going to enjoy what I’m doing next year and not spend my time stressing about things out of my control.  Time in college is a limited thing and the time you have always runs out… make the best of it for as long as you can freshmen.

I guess I could just buy more shoelaces… but what does that mean for life lessons? Money buys you everything…?