Today heralds the two-week anniversary of my return to U.Va. after a long month of respite. This past winter break was perhaps the first break in a long time that I didn’t have to study for some sort of standardized test. Suddenly before me was an endless line of 24-hour periods with nothing to do but bake scones and play piano. Honestly, it was like hearing the jingle of the ice cream truck on the way home from a long day at kindergarten. I was tickled. I slept in until noon, sat on the couch eating chips and wore the same baggy clothing for three days at a time. Last semester, I wrote another article about my secret, neurotic desire to be a vegetable. I had officially achieved vegetable status after checking my phone to see I had taken a total of 23 steps all day.
I spent lots of time with family and friends, but overall, my winter break was marked by general immobility. I guess my inertia was a physical sign that the first semester of college had been a relentless whirlwind. Sure, I sat for hours at a time to read my psychology textbook or fall asleep in lecture, but my mind was never still. My thoughts jumped from one event to the next, from anxious decisions to moments of gratefulness — a perpetual checklist scrolling over and over. During break, I could finally take a breather. Once my mind slowed, the weight of all that had happened first semester came down like a brick, fortifying my inability to move. This wasn’t a bad brick, it was just weighty with the failures and the triumphs. I sat at the breakfast table one morning and suddenly felt tears running down my face into my bowl of cereal. It wasn’t sorrow I was feeling, or joy. It was just a weight — like the gravity of all that I had gone through in the first semester was simply pulling the liquid out of my eyes towards earth’s core.
I didn’t expect to learn much over winter break. In fact, I was trying to learn as little as possible to give my art history/biology/philosophy-loaded brain a rest. Yet, I learned a great deal about the importance of immobility. I don’t recommend a 23 steps kind of day, but a periodic hour of absolute cessation during the school year can help keep your sanity and prevent you from salty tear-flavored Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Sometimes, I get the sense that we feel guilty for staying still — as if quietude is a sign of weakness. Or maybe, we keep ourselves busy so that we don’t have the mental space to think of problems or conflicts. Rest, however, is an innate part of ourselves and essential for living life well.
Often, the best moments in a poem are the commas and spaces. The quick breath of silence is powerful, and the words are made so much stronger by the caesura. Without the pause, words become just characters — or at the very least, the real meaning gets lost. In my busiest moments last semester, I felt like I had lost my meaning. The caesura that was my winter break has allowed me to find that meaning once again.
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