If you’re reading this article and it’s still Tuesday, you have around 74 hours left until the end of your working week. At least, what I’d call the end of a reasonable working week. On Fridays, hot girls don’t work past 7 p.m.
If that seems like a lot of hours, don’t worry. They’ll go in a breeze. They’ll slip from your grasp before you even start trying to catch them.
I remember well what Monday morning felt like in high school: the start of a long race. It wasn’t a hard race — I never had to work very hard. But it was dull. Dragging myself to the finish line was my weekly battle.
As soon as I sat down for my 8:00 am AP Calculus class, the infinite jog round and round the track began. Time moved like a slug: the clock was always still. I went to the bathroom and walked up and down the hall. I washed my hands again. When I got back to the classroom, only four minutes had passed.
The next class — AP US Government — was much the same. At the start of the period, we always took a one-page quiz on what we’d learned so far. I couldn’t tell one question from the other. Hadn’t we already done this one? I looked outside and it was pouring. The droplets moved down the window pane, but even they were slow.
It was finally lunchtime. I spent most of the forty minutes in the pizza line. When I got mine, it was cold. Probably for the better. I’d have to inhale it. Class started in five.
Only twenty minutes had passed since the end of lunch. The sun didn’t move outside. The air didn’t move inside. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
When I finally did, a long bus ride awaited me. After that, a long walk home. Long, everything long. "Long day?" asked Mom. Yes. You could say that.
I did homework. I went to bed. I woke up. It was only Tuesday.
College is the opposite. Time flies. I arrived on campus as a naive freshman what feels like a couple of weeks ago. I’m now midway through the fall semester of my sophomore year, and I don’t know how I got here.
Some say that time goes by faster when one is busy. Others claim that the less information our brain has to process, the more time "skips forward." I don’t know that either is a satisfactory explanation. Whether I have one class or five, my day is inevitably very quickly over.
Perhaps it’s the constant expectation of upcoming deadlines that makes time fly. I don’t measure my time in hours anymore, but in TA help sessions I have left before my problem set is due. And there’s only a precious few of those.
But it’s not just the weeks that fly. Take, as an example, a Perkins study session with your three best friends.
The world has never known a time warp so powerful as that library. In my experience, productivity plummets to an all-time low. And boy, does the time go by. In a three-hour session, you will likely manage to capture no more than thirty-five minutes of real work. And that’s only if your coffee order is just right and you remembered to bring your favorite highlighter.
It’s inevitable: Distractions occur every five seconds. Someone coughs in a far corner. A group of visitors walks in. A student starts talking with her mom on the phone — she’s whispering, trying to be respectful, but you can still hear every word. Another one of your friends walks in. You get up to print a document, stretch your legs, and suddenly it’s dinner time. Oh, well. Tomorrow will be better.
Some argue that it’s better that time flies in college. Especially at a school like Duke, college can be an overwhelming experience. With so much on our plates, the best we can do to preserve our sanity is to sprint towards winter break.
But I’d expect most students don’t really agree with that. I think that as much as we feel ourselves struggling, we’re enjoying this challenge called "college" immensely. We don’t want our time here to end.
In fact, to me the explanation of why time flies in college seems clear. They say time flies when you’re having fun. So maybe we’re having more fun that we give ourselves credit for.
Even as miserable as long solo study sessions may seem, there’s a part of us that indulges in that kind of misery. We love looking at ourselves from the outside: back hunched, hood on, eye bags dark as charcoal. Celsius in hand, we’re barely awake. We give "college student" from all angles and sides.
Ultimately, we’re chasing the feeling of having accomplished something difficult. We savor the painful journey by expecting a worthy destination. Not only that, we secretly love getting lost in the deep end of a project. There’s no better feeling than coming back to real-time, blinking twice and realizing that it’s three hours later. You missed dinner and it’s dark outside. But the project is done.
And when conditions are any small amount less miserable than that — for instance, when we’re with friends — forget it. We can only try to suppress our giggles in the library.
I’m only three-eighths of the way through my college education myself, so what do I really know about how we perceive time? All I can say is that in contrast with high school, I keep zoning out during this race. I keep finding myself three or four laps ahead of where I expected myself to be.
College life can be delicious. But the time we have as Duke students is precious little — and we’re eating away at it too greedily.
It’s true. Time is escaping us Duke students faster than we even realize. As fast-growing adults, we should try to slow this experience down. We should pull our eyes away from the next break, the finish line, and focus on what’s around us.
There are a few ways of doing this. Some warn us against social media. Others suggest spending time in nature. Others still advocate doing something creative.
One simple thing that has helped me slow my days down has been seeking meaningful interactions with those around me. Whether it’s a friend I haven’t run into since orientation, a current professor or a complete stranger, sharing a moment with another person infallibly brightens my day. It grounds me.
There’s one connecting thread between all of this advice: We should try to create memories.
Importantly, the same practices that slow time down make life meaningful. By spending time in nature, tapping into our creative side or connecting with those around us, we might be able to slow time down. But we’ll also feel more fulfilled by each day and garner a sense of purpose.
Without grounding ourselves from time to time, we’ll soon find ourselves wondering where the years went. And it doesn’t matter how much we achieved on paper. At the end of the day, we won’t count our lives in internships we landed, but in memories we made.
Whichever means we might try, it's not an easy shift. We need to make a conscious effort to be in the present moment and force time to slow down. Ironically, as busy college students, we don’t have a lot of time to think about that.
But it’s important. Our clock is ticking. Our time here will be over before we know it.
Anna Garziera is a Trinity sophomore. Her pieces typically run on alternate Tuesdays.
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