Apparently, summer is just around the corner. But it’s not. They’re lying to us. Because ahead, we face an interminable number of long cold days and late nights. The weather might be getting a little warmer, but it’s not warm enough. Our workloads may lighten after midterms, but we are not yet free. That sickening time of the year where Harvard suspends us between midterms and summer has come. The future is close, but the present is endless. Winter, after receding just enough to let us know that a world exists where knee-length jackets aren’t standard, is refusing to fully relent.
This is a time that can try even the hardest of Harvard’s souls. The slow, tantalizing crawl of the semester between now and May can – and will – break the battle-scarred armor of even the most anal premeds. And when the break comes (because it will, undoubtedly, come to all of us) it won’t be pretty.
So how can this terrible eruption of emotion (no longer frozen in icy contempt) be avoided? Well, the best way to avoid a break is a bit paradoxical: take a break. And by that, I mean take a spring break.
I know that this idea may be a bit overwhelming. You’re probably tempted to use the gift of time Spring Break gives like you would use a few extra hours in Lamont on a Friday night (a time at which, just to clarify, you really really shouldn’t be there). Or you might want to use it as an opportunity – shadow a doctor you couldn’t during school, organize a charity walk to end world hunger, bust through three weeks of reading for your class on the American novel. But don’t. Put the to-do-list down. Right now.
Your spring break should really be a break. Take the whole week to become you again, the you that you are when you don’t have forty thousand things to do before you go to bed. For starters, try actually going to bed – before two – and sleeping as late as your body lets you, without setting an alarm. And then get up, eat some pancakes, and take a nap. Shut your phone off for a day if you can. Drink some cocoa and try to read a book, preferably some fluffy love–sodden book, at a normal pace without analyzing it for your next paper.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a warmer climate, shed your knee high boots and run around barefoot in some cutoffs. Soak up that vitamin D that your body is thirsting for – just make sure to wear some sunscreen (no cancer here). And if you don’t live in a warmer climate, maybe it’s time you take a jump and just go to one. It’s not too late to book your flight to Cancun, and lots of semi-safe-looking hotels around Miami still have openings. Me, I just dropped eight hundred dollars last night on my dream trip to Puerto Rico. Spontaneity, while not on your to-do-list, can have its rewards.
But in the end, where you are for Spring Break isn’t what’s important. Whether you are here on campus or off on a yacht in Mantigue, it just matters that you take a break. Sleep, eat someplace without a swipe, and resign yourself to at least seventy two hours of absolutely nothing (Netflix, Cosmo, Harry Potter books and baking are allowed, of course). Do not stress about wasted time or things due in the coming weeks. There will be another day to deal with all that. It’s time to give your beloved body and genius mind a rest. So just pretend that spring break is simply a nap. You go to bed after class on Friday and wake up a week later. In between will be a week that, as far as your to-do-list needs to know, never happened. Anything careless or carefree or God knows what else that that week brings is, for all intents and purposes, just a dream. So dream on my friend, because in your dreams, summer may just be closer than you think.