Every year at Oxford College, our Office of Religious and Spiritual Life along with the Center for Healthful Living hosts a weekend aimed to help a few of us learn how to de-stress and bond with each other within our community. While this retreat is mostly for freshmen to get to know each other and to make stronger bonds between friends, the presentation that the Center for Healthful Living uses to set the tone for the weekend in Tallulah Falls, GA, is usually a powerful one. I especially thought so this year.
This past weekend the presentation was all about time, something I personally never feel like I have enough of. The whole “pick 2 of the 3: Sleep, social life, or good grades,” has really proven itself a very difficult task. I cannot remember a night that I went to sleep because I had absolutely nothing else to do, and I know almost no one that regularly does that. The more involved I get on campus and with my coursework, the more difficult it is to branch out socially, even though I am more than comfortable with my group of friends now that I am in my second year of college. I find I almost have to schedule them in at times, or force myself to find time for them, or for schoolwork, or for other things I enjoy.
This presentation put on by our staff began talking about how ingrained time and having a schedule is in our language and the way we think about our days. The presenter asked us to think of some common phrases with the word “time” in them.
“Just in time!”
“Right on time!”
“I just don’t have enough time.”
“I need more time.”
“It’s about time.”
“Have a good time.”
“You’re wasting my time.”
“How time flies…”
“Killing time”
Already in this article, I have written the word “time” fifteen times, and by the time the presenter got to this first point that even our language is tied to our quickly moving society, they had already used the word a pretty good amount. The presentation got very interesting after this first point. A few ideas were presented that, at first, almost sounded crazy, until I started to view time as a resource instead of something like a planner that restricted me from doing everything that I wanted to.
In a planner, or anything like a planner that a college student uses (maybe like a syllabus), there’s a restricted amount of space to have freedom. You might not have space to write out everything you want to actually achieve for the day. In a syllabus, a professor writes you deadlines in which you have to comply to for the sake of your grade.
The presenter offered the idea of thinking of time like we think of air. We never really think about how much air we have left to breathe. What if we thought about time like this? Something that is there for us to use, and that we have to have to go on through our day but not something that we sit and stress about. We took this a little further by talking about what if we thought about time as we do soil. Soil is something that is recycled and replenished by the decomposers within it, much like the turning of a new day. We don’t often worry about the amount of soil that we have either.
This presentation really spoke to me because outside of the assigned work that I have to complete, the extracurriculars that I have committed myself to, and the friends, family, and boyfriend I want to make time for; there are more things I want to learn, more hobbies I want to pick up and more connections I want to make in college and in this part of my young adult life. The materialistic culture that has engulfed our society, especially at universities, makes us so concerned about our efficiency and what we can place on a resume.
If we moved our focus to our experiences, rather than how much we can complete in one day, maybe our stress level could be lowered, even if by a small amount. We could all leave university feeling a bit more fulfilled about our time spent if we focused more on our experiences, and allowed our work to be a certain degree of quality, rather than the quantity of work we can do.
By the end of fall retreat, I was glad that the only thing I had brought with me, book-wise, was my journal, and I started to feel at ease about my pre-nursing track while I was canoeing and utilizing my time like my air.