Emily Hoeven | Freeing time

Growing Pains | On re-teaching ourselves how to let time pass

By Emily Hoeven 12/12/16 10:43pm

When I finish my last day of classes each semester, feelings of happiness and relief sweep through me when I think about how I no longer have to wake up early, no longer have to speed-walk to class and come close to twisting my ankle on the Locust cobblestones. I can finally get a reprieve from the stringent, hectic schedule that I’ve been following for the past 15 weeks. Yet this final thought also makes me feel slightly anxious, slightly uncomfortable. This feeling is exacerbated whenever I look at my planner and am confronted with the seemingly endless expanse of time allotted for reading days and the ensuing week of finals.

During the semester, I often feel like my life is defined by hour-long blocks of time, as if I’m living inside a giant clock. Wake up, take shower, class, another class, lunch, study, class, meeting, meeting, dinner, study, go to sleep, repeat. I am constantly looking at my watch. What time is it? How many more minutes until class starts? When do I have to leave to get to this meeting? How many hours of sleep will I be able to get tonight?

Once classes end, the rigid structure of my daily life begins to relax. And although during the semester, I talk about how much I can’t wait for the hectic pace of school to finally slow down, when it actually does, I don’t know what to do. I love the idea of free time but don’t know how to handle it.

I’ve been thinking about my paradoxical relationship to time a lot recently, because in some ways the nine-day gap between the end of classes and the end of the semester doesn’t feel like nearly enough time to study for my finals and write my papers. On the other hand, aside from some meetings and hangouts with friends, I have nothing planned except studying, which makes the time seem interminable. I oscillate between panicking over how little time I have to do everything and panicking over how much time I have to fill before I can go home for break.

And when I do go home, one of the most difficult transitions for me is temporal. The first couple of days, I think nothing of lying around the house, watching TV, reading, talking to friends and family. But after a week or so, I start to feel antsy because I’m not used to such an open and flexible schedule.

Small-scale versions of this happen at Penn all the time. The other day I had 30 minutes of free time between a class and a meeting. I was too tired to go to the library and study, so I came up with the very creative solution of sitting in Fisher-Bennett and scrolling through my phone.

After about 10 minutes, I became annoyed with myself. Why did I feel the need to “kill time” between events, instead of just being okay with the idea of time passing? Why did I feel the need to occupy those 30 uncharted minutes by mindlessly thumbing a phone screen? What made it so difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea of “doing nothing” (just sitting there and thinking) that I tried to appear as if I was “doing something” (using my phone)?

Why are we so uncomfortable with the idea of stillness? We’re so uncomfortable with it that we pull out our phones to fill the two minutes it takes to log into the computers in Van Pelt. We’re so uncomfortable with it that we talk constantly of the need to “fill” empty time slots. We’re so uncomfortable with it that we can’t fully appreciate our breaks from school because of our sensitivity to the concept of time. We count down how many days we have left to relax, but we also count the number of days before we’ll return to a predictable schedule. And thus, time passes.

It seems to me that free time cannot really be free time unless we stop thinking about, stop measuring, time. It is precisely for this reason that the transition from school to break is difficult: We have to reteach ourselves how to exist without alarms and due dates and blocked-out calendars. We have to remind ourselves that letting time pass in stillness is not the same thing as wasting time. This is, after all, the only way we can bridge the gap between how often we say we want free time — how much we need it — and how unsure we are of what to do with it.

EMILY HOEVEN is a College junior from Fremont, Calif., studying English. Her email address is ehoeven@sas.upenn.edu. “Growing Pains” usually appears every other Tuesday.