30 Jul 2019

How's this term been treating you?

Has it been dragging on slowly? Does it feel like it’s been months since the holidays finished, yet it’s only week two? Your workload is already piling up and you’re stuck studying while the time slowly trickles by.

Or maybe time’s racing along and you’re struggling to keep up? It seems like every time you knock over one assessment, two more take its place and everything is due way too soon.

Honestly, neither end of the spectrum sounds too appealing and both will have you wishing that term would just finish already.

The fact is that the term is in full swing and that’s not going to change for the time being. What can change, though, is how you look at it.

However far into the term you are, however your assessments are spread out, it doesn’t matter. Eventually, you’re going to get through it.

I’m not going to tell you that this term is going to be a breeze, or that the harder you study, the faster time will go by. I could tell you not to stress because this term is going to end sooner than you know it. I could say that—and it might be true—but it doesn’t mean you should look at it that way.

The truth is; you shouldn’t really be wishing for time to hurry up. You shouldn’t ever do that.

After school, whether you go to uni, go travelling, go straight into work, or find your own unique path, there’s always going to be crazy busy periods where you’ve just gotta knuckle down and get shit done.

I’m not saying that you need to work harder or care more about school. But if you could skip forward a few weeks of your life every time you had to get through something unpleasant, you’d find out two things:

The first is that you would live a much, much shorter life.

The second is that a bunch of these ‘pleasant’, responsibility-free moments you choose to live through would be pretty insignificant with no crappy times to compare them to. Unmemorable even.

Most of my fondest memories of school come from the hardest times. Spending all morning restlessly studying with mates, then combining all that built up energy with our exhausted brains to go a little bit mental when we finally took a break. Things like breaking out into laughing fits in the middle of the library as we struggled through some ridiculously hard question together (and getting told to shut up). Which just made us laugh more.

Try to use the rest of this mundane term as an excuse to find the good in every situation. When things get tough, call up your mates and laugh about how screwed you are.

Hunt for the silver linings.

Because, by the time the term is finally over, aren’t the holidays just going to fly by twice as fast? You might as well find a way to enjoy all of it, even the crappy times.