This week, my social media feed was flooded with pictures of a festival that is typically celebrated in March in Nepal. For me growing up, the festival, which is a Nepalese tradition, had less regional significance and was largely cultural, providing me with a day to play with color and water with my beloved family and friends.

As an international student, being away from home means being disconnected from cultural traditions. While a cultural disconnect is unavoidable, when I see the news headlines or posts that friends share on social media, being ignorant about what’s happening hack home fills me with penitence. It had been a while since I read articles about what was happening in Nepal. Even catching up with family members and old friends takes weeks to achieve.

In all honesty, I don’t know how to do a better job of keeping up to date with everything when focused on classes and work, and adjusting to college life. The news cycles in the US and at home are changing constantly, and can sometimes feel astonishing. But at least here in Rochester, the everyday chat keeps you knowing what’s happening outside the campus. Keeping up with news from home, however, requires the extra individual effort I just can’t spare time for while dealing with everything else I have to do here.

Talking to other international students, I find the feeling seems to be common for many of us. Maybe that’s just the reality of living abroad, and all we can do is our best. But with the opportunity to celebrate the festival away from home with friends at the university and learn to forgive myself for not staying up to date with what’s happening in my country, I know what I have at present is exactly what I need to hold dear and deserves my deep gratefulness.

Amazon sells 1，161 kinds of toilet brushes. I know this because I recently spent an evening trying to choose one of them for the bathroom in my new apartment. Nearly an hour later， after having read countless contradictory （矛盾的） reviews and considering far too many choices， I felt tired and simply gave up. The next day， I happily bought the only toilet brush the local dollar store offered.

Too many choices exhaust us， make us unhappy and lead us to sometimes flee from making a decision altogether. Researcher Barry Schwartz calls this “choice overload”. And it's not just insignificant details like which brush to wipe the inside of the toilet with - having too many choices in our creative and professional lives can lead us to avoid making important decisions.

Understanding how and why we make decisions can perhaps help us make better choices down the line. We make poorer decisions when we are tired. It's caused by decision fatigue （疲劳）. The mind can only sort through so many choices and make so many choices before it starts to rum out of steam. That's why impulse buys like candy bars and magazines at the checkout aisle in the grocery store can be hard to resist. We've exhausted                    all our good decision -making skills.

The same goes for our workday. Making lots of decisions not only exhausts us；it can put us in a bad mood. That's why it's necessary to make your most important decisions in the morning rather than at the end of an exhausting day when your energy has been used up. The idiom “sleep on it” is indeed effective when it comes to making big decisions.

When we're tired， we lend to conserve our energy by making choices based on a single factor like price， rather than considering all the other determinants that go into making the best decision. When you're doing this， you are acting as what researchers call a cognitive miser （小气鬼）.

To conclude， letting yourself have fewer choices to choose from can help you arrive at a more creative answer.

When I was nine years old. I pulled out my grandmother’s dress over my young frame, admiring myself in the mirror. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Later in senior high school, I began to dream of being an adult to explore a big world and make adventures. However, I knew adulthood for me was still distant because I supported myself mainly with the money from my family.

Fresh out of college, I was working as a middle school teacher. I was in charge of young people and heavy with that responsibility. I arrived at school early and stayed late, preparing lessons and chatting with students. I was an official adult. I paid my rent and taxes. But I still felt as if I were playing a role. I was the adult authority figure who secretly didn’t feel grown-up in a room full of children. But I wasn’t worried; I was convinced that it would happen soon.

To me, an adult is someone who is mature and trustworthy—a contributing member of the society. We strive to become adults while there is also someone who spends life constantly partying and avoiding responsibility. A grown-up, however, is a state of mind. Our body gets older but something inside us doesn’t feel as if it is progressing as quickly.

In the following ten years, I followed the routines of adulthood: getting married, giving birth and working. My 6-year-old daughter and I often held hands, running breathlessly and laughing wildly. I tried to avoid eye contact with the nearby people who glared at us. I suspect they would prefer adults who would never slide down a giant hill of sand.

I turned 57 recently and it occurred to me that maybe I had it all wrong; I should stop waiting to feel grown-up. What if we embraced (拥抱) the child-like part of ourselves to enjoy it, guilt free? If we’re responsible adults and do all the adult things in a way that works, why should it matter if we don’t feel grown-up deep inside? Non-grown-ups don’t necessarily play games, but it isn’t fun embracing the playful side of life? Why can’t we feel 57 and 15 years old at the same time?