Midterms are finally over, but finals are coming way sooner than any of us are prepared for. Sleep is nowhere to be found and too frequent are my trips to Mo’s for their beef stir fry and steamed pork buns to comfort the deteriorating state of my GPA. I’ve been sucked into extracurriculars, work, school, shows, and other people’s problems so much so that I’m pretty sure this quarter is slowly torturing me and waiting for the kill (probably around week 10).
While life seems crazy busy, my classes somehow feel like millenniums long. I’m nearly 100% sure that I’m loosing years off my life by the time I make it to my Wednesday classes— and I only have one class on Wednesdays. It’s really only an hour and a half.
I honestly have no idea how it’s already November— who let that happen? And why did no one tell me? Life has already became a routine, something along the pattern of waiting desperately for the weekend. And by waiting for the weekend, I really mean the hours after 5 PM on Friday until maybe 3 PM on Saturday. After that, it’s just prep and homework and planning and cooking and laundry and chores to the week ahead.
I’m feeling a lot of things about how this quarter is going, but I find a lot of relief when I think about it ending. While the craziness technically ends between 5 PM on Friday night until the glorious early hours of Saturday, I feel like I could totally use a couple, if not the rest, of the quarters off. It would take me at least one quarter to make up the sleep I compensated for with coffee, candy, and pure ambition to pull me through the last week.
I went out to dinner with a friend the other night and when we were walking home, she said, “It’s just a bad day, not a bad life.” about her day that ended up in shambles. That really put it into perspective for me: so maybe this isn’t the worst day of my life (since last week) but just another bump in the seemingly winding and never ending chaos that is the road of my life.
On Tuesday, my religion professor talked about the word, “love” and how in English, we use it to convey a variety of things. The Greeks, on the other hand, had six different words for six different types of love:
Eros, meaning passion.
Philia, meaning deep friendship.
Ludus, meaning playful love.
Agape, meaning love for everyone.
Pragma, meaning longstanding love.
Philautia, meaning self-love.
How is it possible that we dumbed down the complexities of love into the connotations that come along with the way you communicate the word rather than stick with the Greeks? I said earlier that I’m feeling a lot of things this quarter, but maybe it’s because I’m feeling so many different types of the same feelings. As easy as it is to get caught up in all of the stuff that there is to get stuck with— classes, work, friends, the types of love I have for these things outweighs the sleep and the coffee.
My Philia, my best friends from home, my best friends in Chicago! Agape, the communities I am so lucky to be apart of, the enduring pragma I have for my major despite the stress and the overwhelming nervousness that comes along with it! Eros in the sense that I’m falling madly in love, ludus for the never ending laughter and joy with my friends. I am growing and becoming a person that is experiencing waves of philautia. These are all the reasons why I’m having just a bad day, not a bad life. How lucky am I to have so much love for such a beautiful life?
