We’ve had a couple days of unbroken, unbelievably beautiful weather in Belfast this week. I’m talking SUNLIGHT, mid-fifties, and so much blue sky it could swallow you whole! I’ve been saying for months that all I want is to have a picnic with my friends in the Botanics, a cute park behind our school. But with the weather so predictably distasteful (if it’s not rain, it’s cold; if it’s not cold, it’s extremely windy; if it’s not windy, it’s rainy and cold), a casual park sit or picnic date has to be impromptu. And if there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s impromptu anything.
But yesterday I had one task1: go to campus early to skim a book I had three weeks to read, but waited until the day of to start before my class at 4pm. And what better place to speed-skim a book you procrastinated than in a park on one of the first non-wet and marginally warm days?
Clearly, I was onto something since every one of Queen’s 25,000 students seemed to be in the main green of the Botanics— though they were probably more encouraged by today’s date (4/20) than by catching up on homework.
So there I sat, on a bath towel I’d folded up and stuffed into my tote bag, in this sea of young people my age just lying in the grass. Many sat in groups with a handful of friends chatting. Some kicked around a soccer ball, and others tossed a football (despite the no ball game signs.) I watched two kids practicing flips, trying to coach each other as they learned, and they did actually improve over the hour or so I sat watching, trying to seem like I wasn’t watching. That’s really what we all were doing— peering curiously at each other, pretending not to.
Eventually, I lay on my stomach, letting my back warm in the sun (I always get an intrusive thought as if I were one of those little hotdogs in those gas station warmer things), listening to the chatter rippling all around me, but noticing a kind of quiet and unexpected stillness that came from just being out in nature. Watching the wind ripple through the grass, I thought, “Man, Walt Whitman was really onto something.”
My friends, Ellie and Gil, stopped by on their way onto other things, and we mused about how different the Belfast in front of us was compared to the Belfast of November (the sun hanging low in the sky and threatening to burn out any second now at 2:30 pm and the wind and cold making me appreciate the (now I acknowledge) mild Southern winters I’d complained about all my life) and even the Belfast of last week (not cold, but so rainy and windy you can’t even bother with an umbrella.) I was honestly touched by this experience. I’d never experienced so many people taking extended time out of their day, especially on a day in the middle of the week, to hold this space of leisure for themselves and their friends. Ellie and Gil thought my shock at this was funny and asked if I hadn’t experienced this in college. I really hadn’t.
This time last year, as I was finishing up at Furman, I was spending most of my days outside and leading campaigns for mental health, rest, leisure, and community building through student government and through Justice Forum (the social justice student org that I was president of). Everyone I knew at Furman was/still is a workaholic who experienced burnout frequently, often alongside mental health struggles that were difficult to find adequate support for. I’d come up with a plan for a monthly mental health awareness day that would feature collaborative activities encouraging slowing down and taking time to do something fun with friends from different student organizations. And the first one, though I’d spent over a semester trying to get the idea of a monthly mental health day institutionally backed2, talking to student life admin, professors, and students from all corners of campus to fully understand what students wanted and needed from a campaign related to mental health, and I’d spent hours prepping for the day, it flopped. The same students I’d collaborated with to get the idea out of the talking phase criticized the effort as a failure to understand student needs and failure of my ability as Student Body President to make progress on what students really wanted. It stung. 3
After the flop of Community Day4, the realization that I could not finish the things I wanted to do through SGA, the looming resolution (if you can even call it that) of the 80-day conduct investigation, and my graduation less than a month away, I felt dizzyingly disillusioned. In the last days, much of what kept me together was morning walks and coffee before class with my friend, Caroline. Talking with her was like zooming out on the microscopic prickle points of our lives and remembering that we were a part of a much larger moment and on a much longer trajectory than what we could see right in front of us.5
We reflected often on the sticky points of our time at Furman— the biggest one for both of us: the grind culture that everyone refused to admit but was constantly upholding. It was no wonder that Community Day flopped in an environment where people could not help but stay busy, rushing, and overloaded. We were a part of this, too; we could not deny it. I’d invested my entire self into the achievement culture, running myself totally into the ground, and I’d been rewarded for it. And so was everyone else.
Furman had so many beautiful green spaces, but they were hardly used outside of the yearly FUOC formal or the occasional srat function. Unless you were taking time for a meal or holding a meeting, or taking a study break and stretching the legs, no one really communed outside. Maybe you’d see an eno or two on a nice day, but young people didn’t just sit in the grass with their friends soaking up the sun. Most of our connection to the green space on campus was directly related to our academic/extracurricular work, not to our leisure or community building.
At the end of senior year, I promised I would never let myself live the way I did when I was at Furman ever again. It was too taxing, and no award or recognition could ever be worth the husk of a person that I’d become in the process of leaning into the dominant culture. Even a year later, I am a recovering workaholic.
One of the ways I am deprogramming myself out of my internal pull toward toxic grind culture is by spending as much time as possible outdoors. Some of this is in pursuit of larger goal (the marathon, for example, has kept me disciplined in getting outside), but a lot of it is because I know I deserve leisure, I deserve rest, and I deserve play, and I’m finally creating time and space for it as if it were any other priority in my day. It is consistently the most rewarding and fulfilling action of my day, though it is still often the hardest to give myself permission for.
My amazement at the way young people gather in the parks on nice days here in Belfast probably isn’t really about the act of gathering itself (though gathering continues to move me and community, in general, is very tender and special to me), but really an awe, and maybe a kind of swallowed disappointment, that it has taken me this long to allow myself the space to rest, play, and do nothing, while others seem to have some internal knowing and guiding compass about this.6 Ellie also talked about park culture in other places she’s lived, like San Francisco, and I recall my friend Nath returning from a MayX in London talking about how he loved how people just sat in the parks. It was a foreign concept for Nath, as a Furman student also from my hometown, and I remember hims saying it was moving for many of the same reasons I've mentioned here.
Anyway, I’m learning. I’m catching up on the time I missed in the sun in undergrad. I have six and a half more years as a student, and I will be actively building my career as an academic in the process. I know that the world I am staking my life in is the same one that left me feeling so empty by the end of my undergrad career, and it will seek to reward me for the same draining behaviors. But I am learning a defense against this. I am learning to hear the guiding voice within me that says I do not need to hustle or grind or run myself into the ground to live out my purpose in my community and to do well in my career.
Slowing down and centering have been the big lessons of last year and this year. I am finally not fighting what my body has been trying to teach me. And it is revolutionary.
Remind me, at some point, to write about Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. Much more to say on this. Until then… you can find me in the grass of the Botanics with everyone else. :)
I procrastinated on finishing this, so now this is two days ago, but that just doesn’t flow, so just pretend 4/20 is still yesterday.
I was told that the University could not give any days off from classes, but professors said, though they would not offer to forgo their class for the day, they would intentionally start a class conversation related to mental health in their class for that day. And some of them kept that promise.
YikYak really made my life fun that day…
The Community Day idea was later co-opted, literally word for word, by a girl in SGA and a white guy who was running for President (who did not win). I literally sat in one of our campus lunch spots listening to his promise that as SBP he was going to create these mental health days, and when I confronted him, he said he’d just been fed the idea from a girl on my council who had taken it from me. Of course, when he said it, everyone cheered and clapped.
One of the things I loved most about Caroline and hanging out with her was her insistence on hosting silly gatherings just to hold the space to play. My favorite gathering was when somehow Caroline and her apartment organized like 60 students to play sardines in the locked science building at 10 pm. Like 40 of us had crammed behind a sofa waiting for others to come find us. And the last one to be found had won by curling up in a trashcan.
Really, I know this is just about culture. But I grieve for the time I spent thinking hustling academically and extracurricular-ly was the way to a happy and fulfilled time, when really I should’ve just been holding onto my inner child and chasing joy.
When the weather is nice, you can find bunches of people hanging out in Marion Square here in Charleston! When I was studying in Chile, I loved the “plaza culture”. There were little parks EVERYWHERE and I made a point to go to the one by my host mom’s apartment and read every day. Something I miss the most about living abroad.
this part !
"I grieve for the time I spent thinking hustling academically and extracurricular-ly was the way to a happy and fulfilled time, when really I should’ve just been holding onto my inner child and chasing joy."