This week marks the end of week 8 CSULB students, so it means midterms, essays, studying, and instantaneous combustion with a light drizzle of puppies and kittens. (Yes, they’re either bringing or have brought those little fuzzballs to campus.)

Fortunately for me, most of my professors are not giving me a midterm. Instead they gave me essays to write, which is—if any of you guys know me well enough—a godsend. Since I can polish each essay off in about a week and since there is hardly any homework at the moment, I have a lot of free time.

So here are the things I have done this week:

1. Binge-watch the second half of Season 10 and the beginning of Season 11 of Supernatural. (That one scene where that one chick ends up dead in a bathtub literally killed me.)

2. Read. I shit you not, I walked into the library today telling myself, “You’re only going to get two books.” Fifteen minutes and six books later, I’ve determined that I have a serious reading problem. But hey, at least I can finally read up on some quantum physics.

3. Frequenting the gym so much that a Kinesiology major asked if I was a Kinesiology major. (I was honestly very flattered but because I royally messed up my knee by ungracefully falling off my bike, I am reduced to jogging at a sad hobble. And I will not be seen alive doing that at a gym where a 5 foot tall girl can bench press three of me.

4. Writing. SWEET, SWEET NECTAR OF THE GODS I CAN WORK ON MY NOVEL. Granted, #1 of this list is making that a bit difficult to actually DO but a thousand or so words a day ain’t too bad in my book.

But most of all, in midst of ALL of this stuff I’m doing, I think. I think about how we, particularly college students, are expected to be doing something “productive” at all times of the day. We must be productively studying or productively going to class or productively attending club meetings or productively working or productively resting or productively sleeping. Time is a currency that we will never earn back and we must not waste it on anything that isn’t productive.

I’ve come to think that this strange idea of “productivity” is actually a distraction to us. We distract ourselves from reality because it’s too much to bear at times. If we think too deeply into the causes of our emotional stresses we may very well break down from the pressure of it all, so instead we distract ourselves. We don’t want to think about anything below the surface, anything deep, because it will definitely throw us into a downwards spiral that we may never break out of.

So, I guess ruminating about our stresses is not any better than distracting ourselves with social media or Netflix, but that doesn’t exactly cancel out ruminating about things in general.

Every time I go out in the morning, people are moving. They’re walking or biking or skateboarding or scootering or driving. Some might be talking to friends, some might have headphones or notes from class, some might be on their phones. And while all of that’s happening, I’m on my bike, looking at the horizon, thinking, “Jesus, that’s a pyramid.”

There are a lot of pyramids in the U.S. (both ancient and modern ones) and I’ve known for ages that there was a big blue pyramid on the CSULB campus, so the Walter pyramid is neither unknown to me nor a scarcity in this country, but for some reason I want to think about that pyramid. Every time I look at it, I can feel myself wanting to just stand there and look at it and think about it.

There’s definitely no rhyme or reason to it. I don’t want to think about it to create a John Green-esque observation about life or to look thoughtful in front of everyone else. I just want to think about the damn thing because it’s a pyramid that just sits there for all hours of the day. People walk by it or drive by it like it’s nothing but it’s a dang pyramid.

And even though I have such a fervent desire to think about that pyramid, I don’t think about it. Every time I look at it, I get that urge to think but I set that thought aside for another day. I instead think about something productive, such as homework or studying or writing. Because for some reason, thinking about a pyramid isn’t worthy enough for a couple of minutes of my time.

I reckon that each and every one of us has a “pyramid” in our lives. We all have something that we don’t think about, not because it bothers us but because we feel like we don’t have time for it. We live in such a society that we believe that wasted time is equivalent to unproductivity or laziness, and that’s just not true. To think about things as mundane as a pyramid isn’t a waste of time, it’s a small experience of life that makes the space between one productive thing and another seem less… Hectic. Every thought can’t be productive, and every other thought can’t be one that tells us to be productive.

My advice to you is to stop being “productive.” Find that pyramid in your life and think about it.