Just say yes

As I logged on to Segue today to check my Spanish homework for the week, I was momentarily taken aback by the startling revelation that it’s already Week 10 of the semester. Thanksgiving is two weeks away, the end of the semester is fast approaching, and somehow I’m still in a September mindset. It may be the deceptively beautiful weather of the past couple days that’s had me breaking out my summery apparel again, but I couldn’t help feeling that this semester has disappeared faster than I would have liked.

As a sophomore, the pace of things generally seems to have picked up. Classes are more demanding, big decisions loom on the horizon (and it seems like the vast majority of my classmates are intimidatingly certain about how to pick an advisor and where they’re studying abroad) and my increased awareness of the vast array of potential adventures that exist in and around the Middlebury campus leave me with no shortage of fun options with which to fill my (limited) free time.

Being busy is fine; in fact, it’s how I like to live my life. “You can sleep when you’re dead,” a friend told me once, and I temporarily adopted it as my new life motto until I developed a mysterious “viral illness” that’s had me down for about three weeks now. While it seems a little extreme, and I’ve definitely re-incorporated sleep into my life since I’ve been sick, I still believe in the theory that you should embrace opportunities to be spontaneous and make life memorable.

It’s all too easy for a week to slip past in a blur of work and the various other commitments that so many students seem to juggle with varying degrees of success. While everyone has those weeks with three midterms and a paper, finding ways to break up that pattern is crucial to remaining the happy, balanced person that you’d like to think you are. Throughout the fall, JV soccer practices were a time for me to forget the stressors of the day, and doing things like going out to dinner with friends, spontaneously driving to Bristol to find a waterfall, and spending a Saturday afternoon at the Co-op’s Harvest Festival all helped to remind me that the semester is about more than just work.

Whether it’s something as simple as going for a run surrounded by the beauty of Vermont (running at Middlebury = SO much more fun than running around the suburbs of D.C.) or something that takes you a little further from campus, like a trip to Burlington, finding the time and the motivation for these adventures is, I feel, always worth it. Next time a friend says, “Wanna get off campus for the afternoon?” or “Let’s go to Carol’s and get some hot apple cider,” just say yes. No matter what it is, it’ll brighten up your day, and make your semester more memorable; you don’t want to find yourself at week 13 looking back and wondering what happened to weeks 1-12.