Can we ever be truly “present” at College?

AAt college, it can often feel like everyone is always one step ahead. Planning summer trips, internships, jobs, Erasmus. Days pass in a constant speculation on where we’ll be –and what we’ll be like – this time next month, year or decade. At this time of year especially, when daylight savings jolts us, slightly bewildered, into a new season, the future seems to be approaching all the quicker. But is that a symptom of the academic year nearing its end, or just of college in general?

As students, we live by necessarily numbered weeks, and in a state of nearly-but-not-quite. I am not quite a grown-up, haven’t quite left home, haven’t quite got it all figured out yet. When well meaning adults ask what course I am doing and I cautiously reply “English”, their next question is always “to do what?” College is seen by many – often necessarily, due to its cost and the work a degree mandates – as simply one step in the route to a career. It is a transitional period, and therefore definitionally liminal, constantly moving, dragging us along with it. But what defines the joy of college, for me, is those moments of forgetting about all of that. When the sun comes out unexpectedly, and your route to the library is derailed to doze on the grass, picking at splinters of green with your fingers and squinting up at the other people who stop to breathe, for a little, in the warmth. Sitting around after dinner with friends, plates mopped clean but no one moving them because the conversation keeps dissolving into a glorious mess of tangents. The in-between times in these in-between years, I guess. When time feels like it is whizzing past, there is a pressure not to waste it. This often manifests itself, for me, in neurotically planning out each day. Yet, maybe in order to really respect time, we need to let ourselves waste it, in a small way. We need to feel it slipping by without worrying about grabbing on. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik coined the phrase “causal catastrophe” to describe “the belief that the proof of the rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children is in the kinds of adults it produces.” Childhood is not valuable only as a means to a ‘good’ adulthood, whatever that might entail. In the same vein, the worth of our time at college is not solely determined by its effects on our futures, even if it is designed to carry us towards them.

I’m not trying to say we have some obligation to slack off in order to make the most of our time at Trinity. Or even that we have to savour every moment. Sometimes I just want to sit in a Lecky pod, eat some almonds and scroll mindlessly. At other points, the passage of time is a reprieve; there are moments you are glad to let pass you by. I still find myself caught though, every now and then, in the cliched wish that time could stop for a moment. I forget that it can, in a way, but it involves me stopping, too. In our economy, stillness is stagnation. If it is lauded, it is because a break can help you move faster and further in the future: a pause in productivity is only positive if it makes you more productive. Even sleep, the act of doing nothing, has been co opted into a measurable and an improvable, a period to optimise in order to better yourself and your time.

College years go by too quickly, everyone says it. But rather than trying to catch up, I’m resolving to see what happens if I’m content with letting them slip a little. Because it’s those moments of slippage, of not watching the clock, that I will remember when I do finish college. That time will undoubtedly come, but maybe we don’t have to think about it right now. To the contrary of everything I’ve heard teachers and lecturers say about thinking ahead, maybe we shouldn’t.

Phoebe Pascoe is a columnist for Misc.