BY AYBALA DENİZ aybala.deniz@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Hello everyone! I hope you had an amazingly relaxing, recharging holiday and are ready for the new semester. I didn’t have any plans to travel for the break, so I was at home. I spent the first two or three days rather like a corpse; all I did was sleep, do some surfing on the internet, hang out on social media and watch some movies/series. At the end of the third day, I noticed that I wasn’t feeling any less tired. How could this be? I spent all those days “resting,” and yet I was still exhausted?
Then I noticed that while I was on social media, I was feeling kind of uneasy; it was like a guilty pleasure. I knew that I was wasting my time, and that time wasted wasn’t doing me any good. I was feeling like I was living the same day over and over again; and the holiday wasn’t going to last forever. So I decided to give up social media for a while and do some other things instead. I started by deactivating all my accounts. My friends had my number anyway, and we kept in touch as usual. So I wasn’t asocial during that time, and I didn’t miss anything.
After closing my accounts I was really relieved, but to be honest I also felt a bit empty, since I couldn’t open Instagram or Twitter anymore whenever I felt bored. I needed something to fill that gap, so I made a plan. I found some activities that I’d been thinking of doing but had kept putting off.
Reading
I hadn’t been reading as much as I did when I was in high school, and this really bothered me, since I’d kept buying books even though I didn’t always read them. So first, I aimed to finish three books during the break; I planned this with one of my closest friends, so that we could motivate each other to keep going.
Learning Coding
With so many engineers and computer masterminds around me, I was feeling a bit illiterate about not knowing how to code and so decided to learn the basics. I found a fun app called “Mimo” to get used to the terminology without getting bored, and then planned to maybe take a more in-depth course. So far, so good.
Learning a Foreign Language
We all took language courses in middle school, or even at university, as electives. But they were only courses for having a bit of fun and then forgetting once we got an A (even though some of us didn’t get any As – guess who). Anyway, I remembered learning German for three years in high school, and felt some regret about forgetting most of it. I decided to take learning it seriously this time and found a course from Udemy. I also already had the language learning app Duolingo and started using it again. (See, there are so many things to do with your phone besides going on social media.)
Playing Computer Games
Yes, I’m not all boring. Even if the things I listed above don’t seem any different from the things we do in school (basically, learning), I still had fun because I liked learning them. But of course I needed some pastimes to rest my mind a bit, like playing computer games. So I downloaded the games I’d once bought at my friends’ recommendation but never found time to play, and played them. I’m not a professional gamer, but I’m having fun.
Watching Oscar-Nominated/Festival Films
I’ve been following the Oscar nominees, but I hadn’t seen some of them because of finals. So I watched them one by one, and discussed them with my friends. It was one of the most fun things I could have done. I recommend that you at least watch “Parasite,” if not the rest, and read the reviews of it.
Finishing the Unfinished
Do things that are left unfinished bother you the way they bother me? I went back to those little things and simply finished them one by one. I finished watching that series, reading that book, writing that story – basically, getting that thing done. One thing I learned from 2019 was that “we need completing, instead of achieving” – because I think when we leave something unfinished, the mind keeps processing and working on it in the background. Once that thing is finished, it’s released from the mind.
Doing a Puzzle
If you like jigsaw puzzles, doing them is an amazing activity for resting your mind and thinking things through. I couldn’t believe how some questions I asked myself were answered, and some problems were solved while I was calmly sitting there doing a puzzle. It was kind of like meditation for me. You can see my lovely (and completed) puzzle in the picture.
Bonus: Teaching My Cat to Sit When Told
That didn’t go so well, as you might imagine.