“The first day of school.”

This is a phrase that holds so many memories for me. When I remember my first days of school growing up, I think of my mom making me pose for a photo in my Catholic elementary school uniform in front of our home. I think of how I tried not to get my new white shoes dirty as I ran across the grass at recess. I think of walking by myself to school for the first time, driving by myself to school for the first time, running late for my 7:45 a.m. class and hoping the traffic lights would work in my favor.

I think of the desks I sat at and the hallways that I walked through. I think of my classmates and my teachers. I think of the simultaneous sadness and excitement, the anticipation and the uncertainty that came with returning from summer vacation to begin a new school year. But more than anything, I think of shopping for school supplies.

For me, going shopping for back to school carried something akin to the magic of Christmas — I truly would look forward to it all year and eagerly await the day when I could wander through the aisles of Target for hours on end, deliberating over which notebooks and pens to buy. School supply shopping became a ritual that included my mom, my sister and me. We would make a whole day out of it, and when that day arrived, we would strategize to head to Staples first (they had the best planners and pencil cases) and Target afterward (they had better notebooks and craft supplies). We would bring a list sent to us by our teachers and cross things off as we went along, everything from scissors to red pens to sticky notes to number two pencils (Dixon Ticonderoga, to be exact).

Since I had an older sister who was always shopping for the supplies two years ahead of me, I knew how things worked. I knew that once I made it to third grade, it was time to graduate from liquid glue to glue sticks. Fourth grade meant we would learn to write in cursive and primarily use a pen instead of a pencil. Fifth grade meant I could purchase the 64-pack of crayons (with so many new colors and a built-in sharpener in the back) instead of the normal 24 one. Sixth grade meant it was time to transition from wide ruled to college ruled notebooks, with one graph paper for math class (hello, algebra!). Seventh grade meant a one-inch binder, and eighth grade meant a three-inch binder or maybe even a multi-layered folder to organize the worksheets for all the different classes I would one day get to take. 

In the hopes that everything would match, I would choose each item based on another, making sure, for example, that my composition book and pencil case were the same color scheme. Once we came back home from the store, I would lay out everything I had gotten to see how things fit together. 

In short, I took school supply shopping very seriously. 

However, as I got older and school became incrementally more stressful, I strayed away from this ritual of school supply shopping, which seemed childish and unnecessary. As the anxiety of high school and college rose and the future seemed increasingly up in the air, my joy for school supply shopping dwindled and the space that I held for it was rendered obsolete. 

When I stopped this ritual, I really missed it, and as I reflect on my younger self, it is easy to see why. 

The effort I put into choosing school supplies as a kid was my way of dealing with all the good and bad  emotions that accompany change; it was my way of trying to find something certain in all the uncertainty. There was something quite pure and powerful about this preparation — because afterwards, once I had everything laid out, I felt a little less scared and a little more excited for the change that was about to come in a new school year. The sense of organization gave me something to look forward to, providing a way to mark the passage of time. 

This is the power of a ritual — it helps us to transition, to approach something new with intention. Rituals do not change the situation; they change us, and they change our focus from the “what” to the “how.” Just as my childhood ritual of collecting school supplies was less about the act of shopping itself and more about the intention behind it, I believe school is not so much about what we study, what classes we take or what grades we receive, so much as it is about how we approach our education and learning.

School supply shopping is a pathway toward intentionality in my schoolwork. It is a ritual that reminds me to frame education in a way that makes sense in a larger context beyond the narrow boundaries of my own life and desire for success. When I look at it in this way, I realize school supply shopping is anything but childish. With this wonderful opportunity we are receiving in a college education, I believe that approaching our classes in intentional ways is one of the most mature things we can do. 

So this year, I went shopping for school supplies again. Here are some of the things I purchased and the reasoning why I did so:

A decomposition notebook from the New York Botanical Garden (the butterflies remind me of my grandma, and the spiral is set up in such a way that it can lie flat at any point along the pages).

1. BIC Pens (I love the way they look on paper, and they last for a long time before they run out of ink).
2. A planner (prioritizing organization helps me to be more present in the moment).
3. To-go coffee cup (so I can have something to look forward to in my 8:30 a.m. class).
4. A graphing calculator (for my dreaded statistics class).

Here’s to a year of intentional learning, one day at a time.