Purple Haze
Practice a little self-indulgence
By Lauren Bagian

Jan. 22, 2009

I’ve probably mentioned in about 75 percent of my articles up to this point that we are all busy--duh--but something else occurred to me about that topic this week. When we get busy, we begin to push some things to the side, start prioritizing and then cut the non-essentials out. However, the things that may be deemed non-essential could quite possibly be the most essential things that we attempt to shoe-horn into our schedules.

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed it in my friends and I’ve noticed it in myself. The senioritis/junioritis syndrome that hits us all in the bleak midwinter. There’re midterms, college applications, musical rehearsals, swim meets and then we start prioritizing just so that we can survive until June. A good friend of mine cut the one thing out of his week that he always did for himself: snowboarding. He told me that there wasn’t time this year, way too much to do. Well I thought that was quite a shame because I’ve been up to Ski Roundtop with him and seen how much he loves to race down the slopes with nothing holding him back. It broke my heart a little bit when he didn’t get a pass this season because I knew that even though he was the one who made the decision not to go up, it broke his heart a little too.

We can’t take the one thing out of our lives that we do for us and only for us. Yes, no one forces us to join the musical cast or the basketball team, and after the last performance or the last game of the season we all look back and think, “Oh, that was so much fun!” But was it really fun the entire time? If it is for you then that is wonderful. You’ve found your nitch! But for most of us, it isn’t fun the entire time, and that’s what we need.

A couple years ago I fell in love with rock climbing. It is in no way school related. I don’t get graded. Nobody there cares if I’m not the best and I don’t either. It is positively the most wonderful activity for me, but over the past year I’ve found myself drifting away from it. My new year’s resolution was to go back to my climbing gym and get my forearm muscles back from the 6 months I took off due to a busy schedule. It mirrors a resolution to exercise more, but for me it’s a resolution to have more fun.

This seems self-centered, and actually it is. It isn’t bad though because if you aren’t self-centered every once and a while you will definitely burn yourself out. Finding something that you do just for you, whether it’s a club volleyball team or making models of classic cars, is in my opinion one of the most important things that you can do to take care of yourself and everyone around you because it will keep you sane.