Time is the most valuable present

Midterms, midterm elections, preparations for Thanksgiving, Hanukah, and Christmas – Is it 2015 yet? Between the stress levels skyrocketing and bank accounts diminishing, who isn’t ready for some snow and spiked hot cocoas?

This time last year, my column was about reflecting upon yourself and giving yourself the admiration and treats you rightfully deserve. This year, I will tell you the same but with a twist.

Albert Einstein said that the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. Well, Einstein clearly wasn’t a multi-tasking, social-media driven, 21st century college student. Because we can all – for the most part – contend that and state that more often than not, everything happens at once.

More often than not students are dealing with more work, thrown into more unfavorable situations, juggling more than countable on both hands. And it’s about this time of the year that the reality hammer begins to tap down on the top of our eggshell bubbles.

From a previous Union article about full-time students, we learned that according to collegeboard.com, experts agreed that a student who works more than 15-20 hours per week often experience decreased school success – leading to dropping out entirely.

Looking at that statistic now, it’s ludicrous because those hours are now the middle cusp between working part-time and full-time. Depending on the company, most full time hours are capped at 30 hours now (research California wages and hours, and labor laws; they’re more extensive than the federal laws).

Over the last 20 years, the birthing age of women have jumped up from 21 years old to 25 years old, and ironically that also is the age of the average college student according to usnews.com.

Therefore between dealing with trying to get paid jobs to make ends meet without working too much, and every other Facebook friend getting married and or having babies, midterm hysteria is breathing down your neck and just as the last vein in your neck is straining to burst – we have the holiday season encroaching. That’s a lot, a lot of time wasted; these are stress levels that even Einstein couldn’t have fathomed.

William Penn said that time is what we want most, but what we use worst. Steve Jobs also confirmed that the most precious resource we all have is time.

The holidays are supposed to be the season of giving, so give yourself some time; time to enjoy whatever it is that your happy heart desires.

We are not told this enough, so allow me to be that person: it’s OK to be selfish sometimes.

We are perpetually consumed with mapping time, creating idealistic timelines, constructing time-managing graphs, and not wasting a second of it. But sometimes, it’s the quintessence act of indulging that we require.

We all can use a pick-me-up, each and every one of us. So before our brains are crammed any further, fried any hotter, take a moment to stretch your legs and enjoy the present. For a lack of better words, it is called a present for a reason.