For much of my time in college and high school, life unfolded as a series of rungs to climb. In high school, there were AP tests and college admissions essays to complete; at university, there were prestigious internships to recruit for, clubs to lead, and jobs applications to fill out. Like many of my peers, I derived validation from the success I accumulated and found meaning from the ways in which I crammed my time with productive activities.
But during the last few months of the spring semester of my Mitchell year, I found myself in a surprising position. For the first time in a while, I didn’t have something in the immediate future to prepare for, since I had already received a job offer for the fall. As my classes wound down and I completed my final assignments, I also found myself gifted with an unusual amount of leisure time. In that limbo period between finishing up my time in Ireland and returning to the U.S., it felt, for a brief moment, like there were no more rungs to climb.
This situation was both uncomfortable and refreshing — uncomfortable because I am so accustomed to being constantly busy with tasks, and refreshing because I realized how much I needed time and space without the pressure to achieve or perform.
It’s not that ambition or achievement are harmful. I’m grateful for my ability to work hard and to accomplish my goals, and yet I also have seen in myself a tendency to pursue accomplishments at the expense of other, important values, like family, faith, community and service.
My final few months in Ireland have allowed me to simply be, apart from striving and accomplishing. This meant ample time to reflect on who I am, who I want to become, and what true success means to me. It also meant walking along the path behind my apartment that snakes along the Shannon river, admiring a sunset on an unusually clear evening, or making pesto pizza with my roommate. It meant going on a pub crawl in the town of Dingle with a fellow hostel guest I had just met, wandering the streets of Copenhagen with two other Mitchells, or clambering up Diamond Hill in Connemara with my brother and seeing the windswept plains stretch out before us, and the towns like small black blotches, and beyond them, the sea.
These moments have reminded me of a lesson I keep relearning: that meaning isn’t just found in the academic or professional success we earn, but also — even more so — in our everyday encounters with beauty, in laughter and friendship and giving of ourselves, and in the ways in which we show love and attention to the people placed in our lives.
I am keenly aware of just how privileged I am to have had this unstructured time, without the financial pressure of needing to pay for my housing or work for a living — abundant time to simply greet the world with wonder without needing to extract something from it. Such an experience is a gift — but also a responsibility. As I leave Ireland, I am still ambitious about what I want to accomplish and the impact I want to make, but spending this extended time without the pressure to succeed in a professional context has given me a renewed clarity about what is most important to me.
At the end of the day, I most want to succeed not by being on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, or winning a Pulitzer (though such things would be thrilling!), but by living every day with honesty and integrity; caring deeply for my family, friends and other loved ones; and orienting my life so that I uplift those who are voiceless and powerless around the world. I realize now, more than ever, that scaling the ladder still matters — but only to the extent that my own climb enables others to reach new heights.