BY AFSHAN NABI (MBG/III)
afshan.nabi@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
The depressing thing about autumn is feeling, with great clarity, how fast time passes. A couple of weeks ago, the tree facing me had emerald green leaves with only small flecks of yellow. A few days later, when I came to sit here again, the leaves were suddenly all bright, beautiful yellow. And now, I face a skeleton of a tree with no leaves. Nature, with its indefatigable, unstoppable energy, changed this tree so drastically in a couple of weeks.
What have I done in two weeks? In all my busy scrambling and darting about, sleeping has been the greatest satisfaction.
How depressing is it to have only sleep to look forward to?
I am having one of those tired blue phases, where every assignment seems five times its size, every midterm an unending, energy-draining vortex, every class a time trap, seemingly taking 50 minutes, but actually lasting days and days.
So this morning I woke up to find my energy reserves hopelessly empty, feeling pulled apart by deadlines, the weight of life in general, and unanswered, longstanding questions about myself, and what meaning I want to create for myself. And then I began to be more depressed about how my priorities are all backwards, because coping with anxiety over schoolwork should not come before finding the purpose of my life.
I ask myself: am I really learning from all this hullabaloo and ruckus of rushing to meet deadlines? Is this how I want to spend my life—looking forward to sleeping?
Throughout my life as an unthinking college student, I have carefully avoided this question, mostly because I have days when I am euphoric because my MBG professor has explained something so profound about some tiny molecule doing incredible things in my cells that I am blown away by the beauty, the magical balance on a sword edge that my body is somehow unwittingly performing. And I leave the class with my head buzzing, exclaiming to myself over and over, and wanting to learn more and more stories about heroic molecules.
In great excitement, I call my brother and tell him how wonderful this molecule is. I want him to be as impressed as I am. I talk in a rush, leaving out half the details or making them up as I go because I cannot remember them correctly; my explanation is haphazard, hard to follow. He is not impressed, but he understands how excited I am, and says “Wow” before I come to the most amazing detail. I cannot tell if he is being sarcastic or not, but nothing can diminish my excitement.
When it is his turn to talk, he tells me how moved he is by “The Brothers Karamazov,” how the author is a genius in his understanding of human nature. I can sense he is excited about this, and I say “Great!” and make up my mind to read it too.
But my excitement about the heroic little molecule is still bouncing about in my head, looking for release. So I find a friend and again, in a hurried, excited, illogical fashion, explain how wonderful, wonderful this molecule is. My friend, again before I finish, says “Wow,” but nothing can bring me down. In turn, he begins to talk about the Markov chain and how he watched a video about it and got excited about the problem of a professor who had two umbrellas at home and none in her office and what the probability was that she would be caught in the rain without an umbrella. I nod my head, pretending to understand, and say “Great!” at the correct moment.
But when the conversation ends, my head is still full of the little molecule and the amazing things it is doing.
However, on days when I am not prepared, or the professor is not as charming, class seems to be about dull details. And I question myself again, for the thousandth time, is this way of life worth the time and energy that I, and other stakeholders in my life, have put into it?
Here is how I dealt with this recurring, new-head-growing-monster problem today…
I drank a cup of coffee and treated myself to a long, calm, unhurried morning outside, just because I am alive and can miss a class to do so. I stared a little at the sky, the fallen leaves and the trails that airplanes leave; I meditated about how small I am, even though, when I am not thinking, it feels like I am the whole world.
I realized that relying on the professor to make the subject I want to study interesting is just plain lazy. (Should I be ashamed that it took me so long?) So, my goal for the day is to find an amazing story about some molecule in my body and then call my brother and bore him with all the details.
I wrote this piece, and exerted myself to try to draw some meaningful conclusions from the mess of ill-planned activities I perform that cumulate to give shape to my life. As soon as I started, I began to feel much better. Writing is liberating.
Here is the conclusions part: Sleeping should not be the most enjoyable part of my life, partly because I have a long, long sleep to look forward to someday, and also because I want to fill my empty life with meaning. In order to create meaning, I must feel excited about what I do. To do that, I have a responsibility to work beyond what is expected. That piece of work should be for me and me alone, because I can define myself, create my own little niche with it.
And on the blue days when I can get no schoolwork done, I can shrug and say, “Never mind!” because I will be able to immerse myself in something that is exhilarating, wonderful, meaningful—like the story of a molecule, or the study of a wonderful book, or the calculation of the probability of being caught in rain.
Or I can use the following “Calvin and Hobbes” frame to defy deadlines in better style: