Let Go Laughing

Many late nights I can be found in my room having jam sessions. I like to turn up the tunes and dance like no one is watching, because literally no one is watching. During one of my jam sessions a song threw it back to 2008, which doesn’t seem like so long ago, but for me, those were the good old middle school days. The song was “It Happens” by Sugarland. The song may be eight years old but I still remembered every single word. After singing at the top of my lungs and dancing my heart out I sat down and began to ponder what that song is really about. By far my favorite line in that song is, “Ain’t no need to over think it, let go laughing”. While the grammar may not be correct, the message definitely is. Things happen that are out of our control but we can control how we react in these times of adversity.
Leader Lab was just a couple weeks ago and boy oh boy was that fun! Anytime you get a hundred FFA members together fun is sure to follow. After a high energy session it was time for the famous Leader Lab dance. This year my team and I had the honor of DJ’ing. It got off to a rocky start when we couldn’t get the sound system working but soon that conference room was hopping. Swing dancing, two stepping, line dancing, cool dance moves that I have no idea what they are named. Basically if it was a dance, it was happening! It was about halfway through the night when mid song the speaker system stopped working. This is one of those moments where the song “It Happens” pretty much sums everything up; no one had caused it, the speakers just didn’t work. What’s a dance without blaring music? Well when it comes to FFA members, it’s still a dance! They started singing along, keeping the energy and morale high. Someone pulled out a phone and played some tunes for a while. And when it seemed as if the speaker system was not going to respond it was all hands on deck to move tables out of the way in the next room over. Still plans continued to shift. Finally after what seemed like forever, changing the room twice, singing songs, and a water break the dance was back on as if it had never been off. “Life don’t go quite like you planned it” was absolutely true that night, but our speaker problems didn’t stop the party. If anything it was a perfect reminder of how awesome, and I mean awesome, Kansas FFA members are. What other group of people would handle everything thrown and still have fun like they did? The wonderful people I have been blessed with the opportunity to get to know through FFA never fail to humble me.

There will always be times when things just don’t quite go how we wanted them to. That is a fact of life. We have the choice of letting it negatively affect us or we can make the best of it. At Leader Lab we definitely made the best of it. Memories, laughs, smiles, and happiness radiate from moments when we chose to not let negativity stop us. We have the opportunity to do this with our SAE. In the field of agriculture there are a lot of things out of our control, like the weather, but we can’t let them bring us down. Our SAE’s are such an important part of agricultural education so we can’t let daily obstacles keep us from continuously growing. When we push past the “it happens” moments and continue to make the best of what we are given, we can accomplish anything and have fun doing it. How will you make the best of every situation?