Stanford University is gorgeous! California weather is like Florida’s fall weather, in one day of travel I went from super hot and humid summer weather to cool, nice Cali weather. One of the more awesome things here is that all of us Fellows get along great! Thursday, during the morning session we explored Mindfulness, finding ourselves and peace within us, doing different exercises and tools to use to help with Mindfulness. After lunch, we all piled onto the bus and drove to the hiking spot and once we crossed the rode, silence took over. My first thoughts of this was I’m so giggly, I’m just going to be laughing the whole time and at first I was kind of giggly, but the longer the hike went on the more calm I felt. After awhile I actually really started loving the silence and just really noticing what was around me, it gave me a lot of time to think about myself, Global Citizen Year and my upcoming year in Ecuador. After the four hour hike, when we came to the end where we could talk, I honestly didn’t want to talk, what did I have to say? Would it be worth breaking the silence? After about a minute though I of course engaged in conversations with the other Fellows and we all felt the same, we felt calm and quieter. This hike in a way, helped in preparing us to leave for our host countries by teaching us that amongst all the chaos we will be facing that we can find a peace of mind and ways to be calm. The more we talk about our countries and the more sessions we have to help prepare us to leave, just makes me more and more excited to get out there and start my adventure in Ecuador.
