Savor Every Moment

I just graduated from the University of Notre Dame in May, and now that I’m done with higher education (probably forever), I have had a chance to reflect on what I liked about my undergraduate experience and what I wish I had done differently. Most of my college experience was a blessed time, full of good friends, wise professors, excellent classes and a happy abundance of extracurricular activities. Yet despite the many joys of this time, there is one thing I would change, and I can sum it up for you in two words: Do Less.

It’s easy, as a college student, to overbook yourself with activities. As a matter of fact, I thought that was what I was supposed to do. During Freshman Orientation, I attended a special Mass for all of the new freshmen at which our vice-president of Student Affairs, Father Mark, gave a beautiful homily about enjoying our time at Notre Dame.

He told us about a recent conversation he had had with an elderly Notre Dame alumnus whose love for the school had only grown in the decades since his long-ago graduation.

“If I could go back there, and be an undergraduate again,” that old man had said to him, “I would squeeze every last drop out of that place.”

As a freshman, I pondered those words and internalized them. Squeeze out every last drop, I often thought, and I promised myself to do just that. So began an endless whirl of fun activities, the sort I’m sure you’re familiar with. Every weekend brought movie nights, dinner parties, and other outings with my friends, while weekdays were busy with lectures, plays and evening discussions on top of classes and homework. It was a charmed life and so much fun, but in the midst of it all, I would sometimes feel restless, as though my activities lacked a center. True, I tried to attend Mass daily, but at times even this beloved “date with Jesus” (if you will) became just another thing to check off on the to-do list, another activity to squeeze in between class and dinner.

Now that I’ve graduated, I find that the times I remember most fondly are not all the activities and events but rather the rare quiet moments between them all – the precious half-hours spent in Eucharistic Adoration, long walks around St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s lakes, the rare ten minutes of prayer at our miniature Lourdes Grotto. It seems that the activities and events, while enjoyable, have merged into a colorful blur, while those moments of peaceful prayer shine with crystalline brightness in my memory. And I realized that I had the order wrong the whole time, after all. To “squeeze out every last drop” did not mean to go to every single event and activity on campus. It meant to savor, to cherish, to enjoy the small and simple moments that happen every day.

From this realization emerged another: in many ways, the time a person spends at college can be seen as a microcosm of the person’s whole life. You are the same person throughout, after all, and the things you struggle with as an undergraduate will be the same things you struggle with all through your life.

Already, I can see the temptation to over-schedule myself is coming back (it’s an easy trap to fall into, as I’m sure those of you who are social butterflies know well). Racing from work to grocery shopping, from evening lectures to coffee dates, I have to remind myself sometimes of what I learned from my undergraduate career: savor every moment, don’t cram it with activities.

So as one of the resident college grads and working women here at the Catholic Young Woman, that’s the advice I want to share with my high school and undergraduate readers: don’t fill up your schedule. Say no to the occasional activity. Make time to sit in silence, to write, to read, to think, to dream, and most of all to converse with God.

And if I’m being entirely honest here, that’s the advice I want to give myself too.