Thoughts on the value of free time

Having lived in Arizona my entire life before coming to Princeton, this past March 8 was my first year experiencing the magic of daylight saving time. Late that Saturday night, like the typical student before midterms, I was poring over notes and textbooks strewn across my table at Frist Campus Center when I glanced up at the digital clock in the top-right corner of my screen: 1:59 a.m. A blink later, the dots and squiggles quietly rearranged themselves: 3:00 a.m. An hour of my life had been whisked away, as though by Hermione’s Time-Turner. I laughed briefly (alone in Frist, like a crazy person), massaged my eyelids and returned to my books.

I laughed because to me, daylight saving time seemed like a funny metaphor for the way time works in college. Around three weeks into the year, I finally articulated in my mind why the rhythm of time felt disrupted from the original pattern. It was both a shrinking and a stretching: the individual seconds and minutes and hours slipped by faster, but each day in my “new” life seemed to fit three “old” days. Each day here holds so much walking and conversing and laughing and writing and coding. There is so much doing. But there is so little time to actually be, to feel the seconds and minutes and, dare I say, hours drawn out in all their slow glory, as they move by.

I’m a freshman, so I think I can say that I remember my high school experience closely. I was busy. We all were. I was always running from point A to B to C, endlessly and tirelessly. Now I still try to run from A to B to C, but halfway between B and C the fatigue catches up to me. At the end of the day, when I sink into my bed, I feel the tiredness in my bones. It makes sense too. Classes are harder. Work, both academic and extracurricular, requires more thinking. I probably spend a good 45 minutes each day just walking.

Sometimes doubt sneaks in. I’m in fewer student groups, and I’m only in class for an average of three hours a day versus eight. My daily list of things-to-do has become shorter, but it’s harder to finish. I worry if, somehow, I’ve become less efficient at managing my time.

Yet every time I see an email on Wilson Wire advertising an event or a club that piques my interest, it’s hard not to feel like I’m letting go of an important opportunity. I wonder if this is a position or club that will make my time here more alive and meaningful. Which is why, for a period, I let a manageable level of busy become overwhelmingly busy. I let my workload slip out of my control, let it grow like a cute little monster that never stops demanding sustenance. Suddenly, my day-to-day schedule had compressed the seconds into slivers of time flitting by at an unbearable speed, and my days were achingly long.

I think everyone learns this at some point in her Princeton career, some earlier than others, and I finally did too. I try my best to do what’s healthiest for me: check the box, and move it to my folder titled “Later.” The reality — good or bad — is that time works differently here, and I repress the need to fill my time with more doing.

I now seek to find empty pockets of time in my days. I’ve come to value time that is completely free and unstructured, when I can set aside "doing" and just focus on being. When I realized that I hadn’t read a book for fun in months, I walked to the public library to find a new book. It was a weekday afternoon after my last class. My shoulders were light after dumping my backpack, and I felt so at ease, taking in the sunshine and the strange almost-spring air. There was a blank space in my schedule, and I was content with leaving it empty rather than filling it with activity. I had carved out a moment for me to be rooted in the present, compartmentalizing the past and the future for another time.

Jessica Li is a freshman from Chandler, Ariz. She can be reached at jnli@princeton.edu.