Some thoughts on time

A rice bowl, yay!

 By Tamika Whitenack

Hello, hello, and Happy Labor Day, folks. I don’t really feel like writing a normal blog post, so I think I will write a blog post about time, and hopefully that will be interesting and a little bit informative of what’s been up with me lately.

Why do I write about time? Well, this week and this weekend have both felt quite long. My roommate, Talia, says that her older sister told her about a theory that when you are in a new place, your brain is taking in way more information than it normally does, and this influx of stuff to process is why being in a new place time seems to pass slower. I think that may be the case for me here. I also feel that I had a lot of free time this weekend, or at least ample time to accomplish all the things I needed to get done.  My workload was not nonexistent, but it was very manageable considering the amount of time I had, which contributed to a leisurely weekend. I think I am not accustomed to leisure, because at home there is always, always something for me to do. I think soon there will always, always be something for me to do here, but I guess it was nice to have a relaxing and slow weekend.

Recall the song “Seasons of Love” from Rent. We think we may have heard someone playing it on the piano. Recall the line “How do you measure a year in the life?”

I haven’t been here a year yet, but I can measure this past week in various ways.

Shall we measure in the pages I have read? All of my homework is reading at the moment. Which leads me to another measurement...

mis gafas son necesario

Shall we measure in how many hours I have spent looking at a screen? This figure is far too high...most of my readings are online, which is cheaper and more environmentally friendly, but my eyes are not happy with this! I will have to start making more of a conscious effort to wear my glasses. And I cannot put all the blame on my homework, I also spend so much more time on my phone and laptop here at home purely for me-reasons. Some of it is somewhat legitimate, texting and such to keep in touch with all the homies from home. A big deal of it is me obsessively checking email...and now that I have both personal Gmail and college Vassar email to check, that is a dangerous obsession. I think it ties in with my weird need to be on top of my shitake mushrooms, but I’m going to try to be better about chilling a little on that. Also, phones are the Linus-blankets of my generation in social settings, and it is too easy to turn to the phone when you don’t want to look lonely at the dining hall or to fill an awkward silence. This is sad, isn’t it?

The stash

Better move on to something a little more lighthearted, such as measuring the week in all the fruit Talia and I have brought back from the Deece this week! Our current collection features, 2 bananas, 3 nectarines, 5 apples, 5 plums, 1 orange, 1 tomato, and 1 pear. We’ve definitely taken out more than that over the course of the week, but we do actually eat some of this fruit, not just use it as fridge decor.

 We could measure in loads of laundry. That would be one, done today, because I keep running out of sports bras. Literally running, as that is what causes them to need laundering. So it goes.

We could measure in tree pictures that I take (1 per day, shoutout to Cam and Andy).

 

Or perhaps we could measure the inches that I walk. Wouldn’t it be fun to tie an infinite ball of string to my dorm room door and then carry it around as I walk around campus, from class to dining hall to work to music hall and back? What if every student did this? It would be so asthetically pleasing from a satellite, except that someone would inevitably trip and fall and there might be blood and death.

We could measure in the number of acknowledgement smiles that I give and receive as I cross paths with people I know, or at least sort of know. I don’t actually have a measurement for this, but I’ll estimate maybe 15/day on class days and 10/day on weekends.

We could measure in phone calls and FaceTimes to friends and family far away, and the fun of hearing what’s new in their lives and the feeling of sort of sadness that comes afterwards, but a sadness that is confusing because I don’t think I am homesick. I think I am just continually, maybe constantly, realizing what it means to grow up and have this be my life now and continually, constantly realizing what a precious life I was lucky to have before.

What about the number of assisted-chin-ups I did at the gym? That would be a whopping 5, and my arms are shamefully sore. Goals for college: arm strength.

We could measure the money I have spent on textbooks, but I’d rather not.

I suppose we could measure all the things that I am learning. But I do not think we can quite quantify that, because learning here is practically everything I do. There are classes to learn from, and people to learn about, and places to learn of...but in a way my life has always been learning, this is just learning new things, rather than learning new things about old things.

This post has gotten rather long, so I’ll try to wrap it up. One of my readings for my education class is called Awakening Loving Kindness and there are some bits from it that I found particularly thoughtful. Here’s a quote:

“When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they’re going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. ... But Loving-Kindness –maitrie– towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. ... The point is not to try to change ourselves. ... It’s about befriending who we are already.”

Farewell friends, and go befriend yourself and learn things and dothings worth measuring!

*secret: anything is worth measuring!