So you know those memes depicting how on-track students are during the semester (“Yeah, let’s squeeze in a quick 37-minute lunch before my second class because it’s with that one professor who always eats garlic pizza on Mondays and I just have to get a proper seat to avoid the downwind!”) but end up totally and utterly falling off the wagon during break?
Yeah, well, it’s totally true.
Add in the fact that the sun sets at FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON and bam! You’re left with a complete loss of time.
Is it morning? Is it night? Who knows, when you wake up at 10 in the morning (and that’s on good days) and end up falling asleep at 2 AM?
I know, I know, we tell ourselves that this year will be different. This will be the winter break where we finally get our circadian rhythms in check, where we totally don’t gain an extra ten pounds because of Christmas cookies, where we rise with the dawn and get ahead in our studies.
The cold, hard truth of the matter, though, is this: winter break is for eating warm foods with (nearly) obscene quantities of cheese, with long periods of sleep spaced intermittently between.
It’s a time where we, well, forget about time. We forget about deadlines and essays and the fact that mere weeks earlier, at least half of us were seriously considering either quitting school or seeking some form of psychiatric help.
Winter break is pressing the reset button on school and maybe even life in general. At least, that’s how it feels for students. Once we graduate and become real adults, winter breaks will become a thing of the past.
Because here’s the thing about time – it doesn’t stop. For anyone, really.
It might simply be a human construct, a way for us to wrap our head around the fact that everything is always happening. We are born, we live, we die, all in the span of a heartbeat. But it always continues.
If the concept of time is all in our heads, no wonder it gets a little wonky when we don’t have the pressure of the world (or at least our future careers and the ever-present knowledge of exactly how much our university tuition is costing us) reminding us of this fact.
No wonder time seems to slow down and speed up, all at once, when you spend time with the people you love. It’s almost as though time ceases to exist when you stop thinking about it, until odd little reminders (like your alarm clock or laughter lines) bring us back into a universe where time is a very real perception.
I’ve recently been confounded with the idea that aging is a disease. Science could be its cure. I feel, at best, ambivalent about this concept.
Is aging just one more puzzle some very smart person will one day crack? Are we destined to become automatons with all the brain “stuff” that makes us, us? Are we all just brains in a matrix of watery extracellular fluid, controlled by giant slugs?
(Should I even be thinking about this random stuff? Is this why I don’t have friends? So many questions, so few answers.)
As of right now, though, aging is something that’s not going away. It is one of the more tangible markers of time, like staring at a huge plate of your mom’s macaroni and cheese until, 45 minutes later, you’re left with an empty plate.
This seems like an accurate description of life. You take some basic ingredients, whip them together, wait while they cook, then eat it. Cue empty plate. The material used is not the same as it was in the beginning, but it can be repurposed nonetheless.
Since we are all mortal (for now), the whole carpe diem thing makes sense. If we spend our entire lives wishing for something we don’t have, time that is yet to come, a future that isn’t ours, we fail to see that when we do get whatever it is we want, it’s already one step closer to ending.
Because no matter how hard we try to imagine the future, we are stuck, inevitably and permanently, in the present. Time eventually brings the future to us, but we experience it as the perceivable now.
Even with this perspective, we can't exactly stop this train of thought. Most people plan, picture, and dream ahead. We might just be hardwired to want to improve. (Or worry. So many things to do, and such short lives we lead.)
But now? In the dusky quiet of winter break, time seems to slow down. It’s a new year, and the potential and promise of 2018 is bright. Let’s not think about everything that could or would or even should happen.
Let’s think about what is happening. Present-tense.