Coming back to college after a summer of low-key existing (waiting tables, sleeping in, eating, relaxing) can be a rough transition. Suddenly 14 weeks of assignments are thrown at you on top of two jobs, new living arrangements, leadership positions, and service hours. No longer do you wake up to your dog beside your bed at whatever time your dreams end, but instead you awake to the beeping of your alarm at 7:26 a.m. telling you it’s time to head to the gym and get a move on. Sweat it out, shred your muscles, in the hope that strength will come through the tiredness. Shower quick, down a smoothie, and head to class. Quick scarf down a bowl of rice, greens, and chicken in an attempt to cover the repetitive blandness of options available. Squeeze in some European Union reading and walk, head locked on your screen as you check Insta, Facebook, Snap, because this is the only time you have to do so. After class, it’s off to work for a few hours before dinner where you catch up with a friend. Then straight to the library to hit the books, drain your brain all before you head back to bed to do it all over again.
Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I think I forget to breathe.
Today, a Thursday, was like any other day as I just described. Running around like a chicken with my head chopped off, hectic. But somehow, today was different. Somehow, in the midst of it all, I breathed.
It all started when I did something as radical as set my alarm to 7:48 a.m., instead of 7:26. Yes, I know that sounds crazy. But sometimes, I think it’s the crazy things we do that give us the space to be ourselves, to step back, to try something new and realize that maybe the way we were doing it was out of some sort of illogical habit. Because when I woke up 22 minutes later than I had been the last two weeks of my Junior year, my day shifted.
I ended up doing crazy things. For instance, I did yoga among the dead. I ran to the cemetery on the hill, found a nice patch of green a respectable distance away from the deceased and balanced on one leg. I looked out at the sun coming up beyond the mountains by the river, over the rolling hills of Pennsylvania’s beautiful landscape, and breathed.
Maybe it sounds radical. But, I believe that college can be radical, too. It can bend us and push us to work, work, work, in the hope of molding us to make something of ourselves. It tells us to do when our bodies tell us to rest. Somehow, I wonder if maybe it’s all a little backwards. That maybe if I step back, do some crazy things myself—like waking up a whole 22 minutes later—I will find the space to see what’s really around me and breathe.
