Well, we’re back! Despite where we might be mentally, today we find ourselves trudging up stairwells across campus, beginning a year of study and toil. But before we get caught up in the routine of class, study, and sleep, pause for a moment and use the perspective that summer provides to really think about the year ahead.
Try not to see the return to school as merely leaving one job for another. Instead, look upon this brave new Monday as your New Year’s Day: a day when you can recommit yourself to taking advantage of the many things available to us at U of T that go beyond books and bellyaching.
It’s difficult, once deadlines start approaching and overlapping, to find the time to exercise, play music, volunteer, and do the countless other things that can actually make us happy when school is doing its best not to. Now is the time to take a few minutes and pencil in these extras, when your year is a clean slate and your spirits are -we hope- high.
Many of the important, memorable lessons we will take with us from this experience will be learned outside the classroom: from time to time it is absolutely essential to take a Ferris Bueller-style day off and see that free exhibit, play some frisbee, and explore the many nooks on campus and beyond. Our school is unique in that it inextricably integrated into the communities around it; we don’t have a definable campus, but a mini-city, the variety of which is quite wonderful if we take the time to nose around a little. Your mental health, and your schoolwork, will thank you for it.
Those of you lucky enough to have traveled Europe this past summer probably quickly noticed that Europeans, moreso than North Americans, embrace and make use of their public space. Granted, European cities weren’t originally built with cars in mind, like ours were, but the almost natural tendency to socialize, walk around and fill the squares, markets, and sidewalks is something we can and should emulate here. Doing so on campus makes the learning process less solitary, and perhaps brings the institutional experience closer to what Socrates envisioned all those years ago.
Work will pile up, as it always does. But, by keeping your ears open, reading events listings, and simply strolling about, it’s possible come next summer to have had some new experiences as well as new courses, and to find that you’ve learned a lot more than you realized.
