Stop Breathe and Think

Life is crazy.

Well actually, “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.”

It’s true. People are crazy. 

We think that we can somehow do everything and anything all the time. We think that it is indeed possible to be involved in everything, have a thousand “close” friends, acheive academic accolades, and be the most fit person on the planet.

But we forget about something.

Our bodies cannot keep moving like that.

The truth is that the day of rest is one of the most important parts of maintaining our humanity. God gave us a day to stop running around so that we could compose ourselves and focus on His mission. Resting gives us a chance to see things clearly.

When we spend days on days on nights on nights running around, not taking a second to breathe, we forget and lose pieces of our lives that we used to know. Tunnel vision closes in on what we think is the most important thing in the world. 

It could be improving our GPA, trying to find the best way to win the heart of the boy we probably should get over already, have the best body, earn the most money…whatever it is, we find these things to be more important than anything else.

Sure, we all say we have our sanity.

We have friends.

We have faith.

We have a job, a major, a plan.

But we also have dark circles under our eyes, crying out to the world that we haven’t really stopped moving since we found our mission. We have irritable moods that have our friends exchanging uncomfortable glances at the lunch table. Regardless of how much success we have on paper, our exhaustion cannot be disguised for too long.

Who wants to admit they are overtired? 

I know I didn’t.

I came in to my summer research with the intent of gettting valuable data to put on my NSF-GRFP proposal. My advisor already had a bunch of ongoing experiments, so it took a little while for us to come up with a strong first experiment. That didn’t bother me. Science takes a while to get started, and once you get started on an experiment it may be months before you see anything worth sharing. 

Once my experiment started, I was in the lab every moment, running four experiments at once.

And that's when I started to get bothered by science.

What bothered me was that I completely forgot what it was like to not meet my own expectations. I assumed that because my experiments this summer were so similar to last summer that I would be able to get the hang of it with out much effort. My expectation was to finish all of my work before orientation rolled around

My experiments totally failed.

I did not meet my expectations

I failed.

So I kept going over and over, running more and more experiments, going to the gym in between experiments, eating lunch at my lab bench. (Yes I know, not proper protocol...no one sticks to that even if my professors at Belmont said they do.)

I was not about to say that I took on too much at once, at least not to most people.

What was funny was how I found out I was taking on too much at once

And it has to do with Reslife and Pizza.

On Friday, I helped my friend with his “End of the Summer Cookout” for our apartment complex and the Graduate School. He put me on pizza duty, which basically meant I was going to heat up 15 frozen deep dish pizzas using three small ovens.

End result?

I made all 15 pizzas, but a lot went wrong. We had no idea which pizza was which, and plenty of vegetarians ended up with pepperoni. The pizzas were not cut yet, and we couldn’t leave knives out with all of the young children running around. People were hungry, and many of them snapped at me.

This would not have happened had I just slowed down.

But I did not admit that until the next day, when I was laying on my bed sick.

My body screamed at me that I had to stop moving. I will not go in to the details, but I basically ended up laying on the floor of my research lab Saturday afternoon, sobbing because I was in so much pain. There was nothing seriously wrong with me, thank God, but my body finally got me to stop moving.

And I finally said it, "Maybe I am overtired."

And a few sobs later, I whispered, "I need to slow down."

As I limped back to my apartment, I started to think about how I could have more effectively made the pizzas. I started to think about how I had approached the entire summer. Perhaps I had been trying to work on too many experiments at once. Perhaps I did not need to be running around the lab at all hours so that I could “get ahead.” Perhaps I needed to stop trying to beat the nonexistent clock that dominated my mind. Perhaps I did not need to be pumping iron at the gym every day at 5:30am. Perhaps I did not need to be doing all of the things I had been doing to "be better" or some other crap I had come up with.

I know I am not the only one trying to do too much too fast. I also know that maybe it is harder to admit that we are trying too hard than it is to actually stop running around. We don’t want to stop because we do not want to fall behind.

However, when we choose to overwork ourselves, we make mistakes that stop us from acheiving our goals. Exhausted, we skip steps, we ignore details, we forget the pieces we normally could keep track of.

My mom likes to remind me in these moments of the wise words of Steve from Blue’s Clues:

Stop

Breathe

and Think.

You do not need to be the one running the show all the time. You can stop, breathe, and think every so once in the while. That does not mean you can't be involved in everything, be fit, do well in school, and have strong relationships. It just means that you have to listen to your body and rest when you need to.

Let that day of rest mean something.

Let that hour before bedtime mean something.

Just because you stopped moving does not mean that you are not accomplishing anything. It may not be obvious, but the thoughts in your head when you are at rest may be some of the best you have had.

Who knows?

Maybe you’ll find all of the missing pieces of your life in your clear thoughts.