Do you remember the exact moment when that feeling of being inordinately lucky melted away? Was it a few days after the orange tiger flashed onto your computer screen with an invitation to join the ranks of the elite? Was it when you were walking back from a party at midnight during frosh week with crowds of other students who had received the same invitation? Was it when you pulled your first all-nighter trying to finish your R1? Was it during a training session for a volunteer group you joined simply to build your resume?
I’m not sure when I stopped feeling like the world had been handed to me. Up until last semester I felt lucky observing all the exotic trees lining the Class of 1975 walkway on my way to my 9 a.m. class. I felt lucky as I thought up questions to ask the author of a book I’d recently read because she was coming to talk to my lecture class. I daydreamed about running into Joyce Carol Oates (who I admit to have stalked all the way to the faculty dining hall once). Even the COS 126 assignment I’d spent the night before trying to tackle felt like a privilege. The thought of having four whole years on this campus with the world’s academic resources at my fingertips: the books, the faculty, the campus, made me feel inspired to learn.
It hasn’t melted away entirely. But my 9 a.m. classes don’t feel like a pleasure anymore, and I certainly don’t feel gratitude as I walk down that same 1975 walkway after four hours of sleep, having stayed up making budget sheets for some group I joined for no reason other than I am suddenly terrified of having a single idle moment. I no longer have time to feel like I’ll learn something that day that will stay with me. Instead, I have my schedule planned out for the day: precept at 9, lecture at 11, lunch at 1, writing seminar at 3, meeting at 5, dinner at 6, lab at 7, homework 'till 2, lie awake in bed stressing for the next day 'till 7:30 in the morning when I have to wake up. Where in that jam-packed day do I have the time to look up at the collegiate Gothic tower of Firestone and feel grateful for the access I have to scholarship that has been collected since the start of this country?
There is a prevalent fear among the Princeton student body of the "idle moment." An undesignated stretch of time is essential for us to celebrate the prospect of unrestricted learning and to feel like we are fortunate. It is this feeling that makes us, as a student body, want to seize every opportunity we can get. This very inspiration is what makes us do too much and lose our interest in the things that made us feel fortunate in the first place.
All my friends have schedules as packed or busier than mine. We, Princeton students, are known for doing a lot on campus and the pressure on us to be constantly at work is immense. It is an entirely novel concept for most on campus that we do not need to fill every moment of every day with some activity or another, yet without time to reflect on the privilege that each of us has as a Princeton University student, we are robbed of one of the necessary aspects of our education: the notion of unlimited possibility.
Every time I force myself to take a step back from my endless stream of work, I feel the stirrings of my previous excitement at walking through FitzRandolph Gate. The prospect of going to lecture, of poring through an endless number of books, of writing dreaded papers becomes a little less daunting. In the large scheme of things, Princeton is a resource for me to grow, not a factory for me to grind at.
On occasion, we all need to take this step back and give ourselves time to remember how we all initially felt when we got into Princeton. After all, we only have few years to do the things that we really want to do on campus. We don’t need to do a billion activities to fill up the time when we could be looking for the thing that will actually make us intellectually and mentally satisfied. Above all, we need to remember that no matter how daily life on campus consumes us, it is perfectly all right to let ourselves be "unproductive" sometimes and remember exactly how lucky we are.
Bhaamati Borkhetaria is a freshman fromJersey City, New Jersey. She can be reached at bhaamati@princeton.edu.
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