I feel like college has a funny way of making you feel like you should always be doing something.
There is always another assignment, an exam in the near future you need to study for, laundry piling up in the corner of your room, or some rapidly-approaching plan that probably should have been figured out last week. Even when you have a free hour or two, it can be hard to actually take the time to enjoy it without thinking about everything else that you have going on.
Lately, I’ve been trying to remind myself that life doesn’t have to slow down for me to be allowed to actually enjoy it.
I used to think that happiness came from the bigger things in life; the trips you spend months planning and looking forward to, concerts, birthdays, or a weekend away. And yes, duh, all of those things are very exciting and do make you happy. But when you are constantly waiting for the next big thing, you start to overlook a lot of your day-to-day life.
The majority of our lives are happening in the in-between moments.
It’s getting coffee at your favorite coffee cart before an early morning lecture. It’s walking to class while the leaves on the trees around you are changing. It’s dancing in the kitchen with your roommates while making dinner. It’s getting up early to go see the sunrise with your best friends. It’s driving and hearing a song you forgot you loved. It’s finding a sunny spot to study, calling your mom on the walk home, or noticing one evening that the air finally smells like fall.
None of these things are particularly exciting, but I’ve started to think that might actually be what makes them so important.
One thing that I feel like I am still learning is that I don’t have to make it to the bottom of my to-do list before I can do something just because it makes me happy. There will always be more work, and for a long time I treated the things I enjoyed almost like a reward after I completed an assignment or a specific task.
But again, the “to-do list” never really ends when you are in college.
Making time for the small joys, to me, means that you are intentionally deciding that 20-30 minutes of your day belongs to you, even when everything isn’t finished. And I don’t think that is procrastination – it’s more about taking control of what you can. It doesn’t have to be productive to be worth your time.
I know the phrase romanticize your life has become one of those sayings that everyone is using, but I actually think there is something valuable in it. Because sometimes you just need to pay a little more attention to the life you already have. College is filled with so many things that may feel ordinary right now, but that won’t always be the case. Seeing your friends in the library, walking to campus every morning, eating dinner with friends, or spending a random Friday night getting maple creamies with your roommates. All of these things can feel insignificant when you are living in it. But those moments are what actually shapes your life and time in college.
None of these moments are going to change your life on their own, but putting enough of them together, you might realize that they make up the whole picture.
And I think that is reason enough to make time for them.