Tomorrow, I start my eleventh semester of college. I have mixed feelings about it, but in the grand scheme of things, how I feel doesn’t mean anything. With the new semester comes many changes, both in schedule and discipline. I can no longer stay up until the wee hours of the morning watching silly movies or late night sports games. I won’t work 40 hours every week but I will have homework that eats just as much time. I will be learning a language, which will require me to prepare in a different way than I usually do. I might actually have to study extensively for the first time in my long college career. A number of my classes have multiple books to read and, as you can imagine, that will strain the time I have. Where before I could bum around after my eight hours of work, now I will have to place my attention on the busy work of school. Will being away from it for so long make it fresh and new or will it just feel like going back to the grindstone?
I don’t want this new season to become a lifeless routine. I want and need adventure, the unexpected. Though establishing a routine may be key to doing all that needs to be done, I hope that rountine never becomes routine. (the first “routine” being a noun and the second an adjective) I hope the routine enables me to seek that adventure because it is an efficient use of time, not merely the easy way into something. It must be discipline that allows me to emerge from the “school cocoon” just as I burrowed into the “work cocoon” this past year. In essence, my routine these past seven months had become routine and I got lost in them, unable to truly experience any kind of adventure or unknown whatsoever.
JA Menter 3
“If life becomes routine, then a person becomes a robot, mindless and automated.”