Starting the year off right

Step one: relax

TESSA VANDERHART, STAFF

“Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way . . . you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” — Aristotle
“Only thoughts reached by walking have value.” — Nietzsche “If it feels good, do it.” — Sloan “‘This getting up early,’ he thought, ‘makes a man quite idiotic.’” — Kafka

Like you, I begin each school year with a renewed sense of optimism, a sense of direction — a forward direction. We spend hours crafting a plan to coast on that precious start-of-term momentum, all the way through far too many classes, extracurriculars, jobs and social obligations. I call this “the push.” Really, it’s not unlike the experience of walking through University Centre these days: too many people, too many textbooks, too many itchy wool scarves.

But let me tell you a secret: now is not the time to get serious.

September, in addition to being the most romantic month of the year — seriously, check out the birth rates for late June and early July —

Parliament isn’t even coming back till October, and neither is the money we all paid into the UMSU Health and Dental Plan.

But all of this is beside the point, that now is the time to be lazy.

Presumably, we are in university to improve our future lives — our future selves. We seek stimulation, and joy, and understanding, none of which can be achieved by sitting in a lecture.

Universities, it seems, have got this all wrong: not only do they not adhere to any of the three quotations I have selected to accompany this article, but they don’t provide stimulation, joy, or understanding — instead only tedium, pain, and memorization. And the push. The resume-stacking, course-challenging, all-decency-encompassing push.

For example, while I do appreciate look forward to the U of M’s Open House to be held this Saturday, Sept. 15, nothing good will come of it. It smacks of artificial hustle and bustle, and little of the slow-and-steady metamorphosis prescribed by nature. Plus, it comes as the new University of Manitoba Food Services finally completes its construction, as drooping enrolment numbers hide behind Aurora, on the eve of the announcement of a new university president.

But a new Wii beckons alongside your new year, and I don’t blame you for not caring. The moral is the same, whether you’re a fresh university student or veteran administrator: university is not a place for rigidity and boredom. Nor is it a place for soul-consuming fastidiousness.

It is — or it should be — a place for loud debates over quiet coffee, for long, lovely and inspirational walks, for dog-earing that brand-new textbook in order to pause and think about that idea until you fall asleep.

But all of this is beside the point, that now is the time to be anything but lazy. You have your whole life ahead of you; do you really want to keep your nose in the books and be nothing but an engineer/doctor/lawyer/teacher, nothing else, forever?

Or do you want to take some time to get to know the campus, to hang out in University Centre, to drink some beer where it is available, and to work on being a good person, if a good person that sometimes writes bad essays or editorials?

Don’t push so hard.