I remember a conversation I had with a friend at the beginning of this semester. “I feel like before we know it, it’ll be time for midterms, and I’ll be behind,” she told me. I’ve always been suspicious and terrified of secretly being an optimist, but now, I’m almost certain I am. After she said that, I immediately thought to myself, “Nah, no way.”
Well.
Here we are in the eighth week of the semester. Believe me, I don’t particularly enjoy bringing this up, but I thought we could all share in the misery of realizing we’re at the halfway point in the semester.
And seeing that this week of midterms can only be followed by an even greater slew of exams just over the horizon, I think it’s good to remind students there is now virtually no possibility of catching up.
Oh, nevermind: Next week is Spring Break.
Yes, it’s come at an ungodly and early time this year, but by the time this column reaches newsstands, a good portion of the Student Body will already be off for Spring Break. And for those of you still with us today — but hopefully soon going off to venture into some forest, a crowded beach, an exotic country or your parents’ place — I’d like to remind you to spend some of your time catching up.
To give you a personal example, my aforementioned friend and I have been planning, since that conversation, on catching up over coffee or ice cream and still haven’t. I certainly don’t think she’s to blame, nor do I think she believes I am, but between all our attempts to catch up on lecture notes, papers, practice problems, etc., we hadn’t caught up with each other. And as I noted, this is only one example.
“So now what?” you might be thinking. “I’m not only behind in my classes, but also with keeping up with my friends’ lives? Not only that, but I’ve only got half a semester left?”
No, that’s not my point. Sometimes life gets in the way, sometimes we have to push life out of the way and sometimes — more specifically, annually — we go on Spring Break.
Spring Break is an unusual privilege. Like Summer Break, it’s one of those rare, extended breaks from the daily grind of work that don’t really seem to occur for adults in the U.S. after age 23 — although this is the case for many adults in Europe or Latin America. We can take that time to breathe, have a genuine moment of self-reflection, consider how we’ve been doing in the past few weeks and possibly reconsider what we’ll do in the next few weeks — all this in the company of our family and friends. In other words, it’s a chance to catch up.
We need this before we get back to the deadlines of daily life or the feeling we’re always behind on one assignment or another. But Spring Break has one unique quality, something that makes it a uniquely college — or at least, early childhood to young adulthood — experience: During Spring Break, we’re given unadulterated time. Time to pull back and consider what we truly want — not what we believe we need to accomplish or what we believe we want to do.
But the point also isn’t to figure out your future in 10 days. Spring Break is to college what college is to the rest of your life: a time to start learning how to prioritize what’s most important to you, so you can apply those priorities to your daily life. And I emphasize “to start” — or in other words, to begin catching up.
Neel Bapatla is a UF English sophomore. His column appears on Fridays
