I spent most of this week brainstorming, trying to come up with an awesome column topic. I thought about everything: admissions, the drinking age, Iraq (for a change), etc. I had envisioned the article-writing process to be sort of like Sex in the City where the character wraps up the episode by moralizing about the general theme of the week.
Unfortunately, real life doesn't actually work that way and except for a cappella callbacks, there wasn't really any prevailing theme to my week. It got to the point where everything I came up with seemed either too serious or too petty or too trite, and I eventually ran out of options.
So I sat in Van Pelt for about an hour trying to find anything that would weave itself into a decent topic, waiting for inspiration to whip me into a writing frenzy. At a certain point, I realized that what I had actually done was spend an hour of valuable study time doing absolutely nothing productive.
Wow, what a waste. I spent an entire hour just watching people study or walk by on the street, looking at the trees and the campus buildings. What I also hadn't been doing was thinking about my paper or my reading or the 10,000 other issues floating around my head.
In that moment of disconnection, I let myself step back and actually see things as a whole instead of wasting time scrutinizing details for things at which to nitpick.
Honestly, if it took me over a week of brainstorming to fail to come up with a decent column topic, I think that speaks fairly well of where we are and why we're here. I think criticism is something that comes very easily to all of us -- certainly more so than praise. I don't deny that many things are wrong and need to be addressed. But I also think that many times our tendency to criticize keeps us from appreciating what's going right.
Most of our time is spent either doing work or, at the other extreme, partying hard enough to forget about how much work we have. We are usually so busy trying to make everything in our schedule fit that we forget a small but crucial point -- myself the perfectionist most definitely included. Yes, we are here to study, but we are also here to grow as individuals. As important as grades are for landing that career-molding J.P. Morgan internship, they really don't mean all that much in the general scheme of things.
I know, I know, we've all heard this before. In fact, we've heard it so many times it's gotten cheesy. And while this may be true, it is definitely something which we forget all too often. After a stressful day -- sort of like today, for me -- you're grumpy and tired and don't have the energy to look on the damned bright side.
Sometimes it's just a question of putting things into perspective and taking that precious hour out of our schedules once in a while to realize that, in lots of ways, it doesn't get better than this -- where we are right now, during this period in our lives.
By no means is everything at Penn perfect. By no means is the world perfect. There are definitely things that need to change -- don't even get me started on Iraq.
But why spend all your time frustrated with problems when you could be appreciating everything that you have?
It's so easy to get carried away worrying about life's imperfections that we sort of forget to think about what's good.
It is simply too easy to blow minor issues out of proportion. In the big picture, it's just not worth it. We get so burdened by getting everything right, between classes and grades and GPAs, that living gets lost in the process.
We should be living now, not putting it off until after college when things really get crazy. We just need to give ourselves the chance to step back and take everything in.
We need time to breath. And to watch Sex and the City.
Channtal Fleischfresser is a junior History major from São Paulo, Brazil.
