As soon as Labor Day weekend ends, students start to look forward. They might claim they’re looking forward to the next big game or looking forward to the weekend. This might be true the Tuesday after Labor Day. As tests and essay assignments start to come down, the weekends and tailgating suddenly aren’t enough. Students start to count down the days until fall break arrives. Then they tell themselves they will finally have enough free time. If you’re like me, you probably start concocting elaborate plans of precisely how you’ll spend your fall break. I’ll look at my bookshelf, half-filled with unread books I purchased from Barnes and Noble. “Once fall break comes around,” I tell myself, “I’ll read one or two of those books.” The reading list doesn’t stop there. As midterms creep closer and closer, I start to tell myself “I have a lot of reading to do for all these classes. Oh well. When fall break gets here, I’ll do them.” Then of course we tell ourselves that after we read all the texts we should have read three weeks ago, then we’ll actually crack open our notebooks and start studying the material. Our list doesn’t stop with nerdy stuff though. Thanks to the miracle of ESPN and sports networking deals, we can watch football all day from 11 a.m. Saturday to 10 p.m. Sunday. If football is not your favorite sport, don’t worry. There are also baseball playoffs, hockey and NASCAR. If you’re not interested in sports, your television shouldn’t suffer. We all have one or two television shows we need to catch up on. As if this wasn’t enough, our friends start to have the strange idea that since we have so much free time, we need to schedule some parties. We start accepting Facebook.com invitations that book up every night of fall break. When fall break actually arrives, we’ve overloaded ourselves. We put forth a task so impossible that even Jason Bourne would crack under the pressure. Our holiday becomes stressful. We manage to only do a little bit of what we wanted to see done. We are unfulfilled and tired. As midterms start to crush us, we can only tell ourselves, “Well, when Thanksgiving Holidays come around, I’ll have my rest.” If you’re like me, you do this routinely. We do this every weekend or every time a class gets cancelled and because of it we don’t enjoy our time off. And chronic stress may lead to depression. An American Psychiatric Association Web site, healthyminds.org, said, “one out of four young adults will have a depressive episode by age 24.” This results in half of college-aged people dealing with stress so much they have trouble functioning. For some, it seems so bad that suicide becomes an option. Suicide is the second leading killer of college age students. The answer to stress is putting a value on relaxation. Sure, with midterms coming up, we have to use a good chunk of the fall break to do work. It would help a lot if professors stopped looking at holidays as wonderful opportunities to assign even more work, but that won’t happen. This means that we have to push aside studying and work to make time for ourselves by ourselves. Thankfully, I had an opportunity to do that this fall break by going on a silent retreat. Most retreats are religious, but if you’re not religious, that shouldn’t stop you. You can make your own retreat by simply turning off your cell phone, driving somewhere quiet and just sitting around all day. Trust me; there is nothing in this modern world so liberating as watching your cell phone die. No music, no noise, no studying, no cares – nothing but an opportunity to look at yourself. Take advantage of holidays to examine what in life you’re happy about and what you’re not. Resolve to make some needed changes and then just enjoy the rest of the day. When was the last time you simply watched the glory of nature and reveled in its beauty? Silence works best for me, but there are many other means of relaxing. The point is that when we have holidays and time off, we need to be willing to struggle to make time for ourselves and escape the hectic demands of college life. When we do this, we take better care of ourselves and are better able to cope with school, friends and work. When you take the time to relax, you won’t regret it. Shouldn’t that be enough to make it worthwhile?
—-Contact Michael Denton at [email protected]