On my 19th birthday, my brother gifted me a Swarovski necklace cased in a sponge-lined box with a pink lid. I carried it carelessly across dorm rooms, apartments, and airports, until, to my own fault, the necklace lay in that box hopelessly entangled. Over the last few years, friends, roommates, and I have spent painstaking hours, armed with needles and lenses and angst and laughter, performing surgery to untangle its precious knots.
The word “school” comes from the word “schole,” which is Greek for leisure. Aristotle described how serious leisure is essential for learning. I came to the University of Chicago with the promise of an education I was told would be “life-changing.” At 18, the idea of anything being “life-changing” lacked meaning for me. It was a mere abstraction for someone who hadn’t yet collected much life. As a senior now standing at this inflection point, “life-changing” feels like an understatement, a hand-wavy word too unspecific to encapsulate the profoundly transformative experiences I now walk away with.
In my first quarter here, I took Readings in World Literature for the humanities Core where we read the Mahabharata. We learned that re-death is probably as important to think about as re-birth. My professor frequently repeated: “Learning requires unlearning.” At first, I couldn’t grasp this idea, until my first essay returned with 37 question marks, no grade, and feedback in ALL CAPS. I thought about Phil the Phoenix rising from his own ashes and knew that a special kind of undoing had begun.
People often tell me that the quarter system is like drinking from a firehose. Seeking some experiences means missing others. Untangling some knots leads to entangling new ones. Poets call these paradoxes, and in economics we call them opportunity costs. Deeply immersed in this serious (and sometimes unserious) leisure, I am reminded of how paradoxes are beautiful and costs, too, come with gains. My roommate in the fall, an exchange student from Santiago, liked the idea of our study nights resembling literary salons, so she called them “tertulia.” This was our excuse for philosophizing fashion instead of working on problem sets. Sometimes, I would bring out my commonplace book, then tell her all about the summers I spent with my cousins growing up. She would show me pictures of her Halloween costumes from middle school. We often talked about love. What my freshman year–self would have called an easy access point to procrastination my senior year–self is convinced was the whole point.
Now, there’s this usual anxiety that surrounds graduation that’s easy for me to articulate. Our friends will no longer live in the same radius. We will no longer have the tolerance to down as many vodka shots or the stamina to pull as many all-nighters. Consultants will meet consultants, doctors will surround doctors, lawyers will indulge lawyers. I will miss the kinds of days that begin with physics in Kersten, move to philosophy in Swift, then macroeconomics in Saieh, and end with a sweet treat at Plein Air. I will miss the infectious enthusiasm of my neuroscience friend who composes music, my pre-med roommate who directs the ballet, and my economics friend who writes film criticism. Call me naive, but the soft, uncommon curiosities we mold here will soon harden into prescribed careers. Like the ornaments that entangle, clay hardens, and identities calcify.
Perhaps my anxiety is really a fear of discontinuity, or a reflection of how unnatural change feels to me. Yet, right beneath this familiar anxiety is something deeper, less articulate. It is this knowing that life will accelerate beyond our control, leaving us little time or space for the “serious leisure” I have come to cherish so dearly. Endowed with all the rightful sentimentality of a graduating senior, I think, as ABBA sang, how this time is “slipping through my fingers.” There’s even statistical evidence for this. At the age of five, a year is as much as a fifth of your life. At age 20, it’s only 1/20. They call it the log-time effect, and it explains why, come week four, we collectively fail to reckon with how quickly the quarters pass us by. Psychologists tell us that routine compresses our perception of time. As we step into what seems to me will be the routine demands of adult life, what if college remains a bracketed experience, separated in our memories like a chapter we only occasionally turn back to? This experience feels irreversible and even irreplicable. How do we slow down?
In a moment of an Aristotelian kind of reflective leisure, Eden Anne, a close friend of mine, once sat down with me in Grounds of Being, pulled out her laptop, and wrote: “Time feels longer/ when you stop/ so desperately/ trying to hold on/ to its coattails.” Yes.
On that Swarovski box is engraved a silver swan. Unlike many of us, the swan isn’t inflicted with the duck syndrome, flailing frantically beneath the surface while calmly gliding above. Contrarily, this swan is a symbol of poise, of serious leisure.
Very soon, we will drift away from this shore. Some day, we may even drift apart from each other. But I know we glide into the vast expanse of the world with these ripples of all that we have learned and unlearned. There is so much waiting to be untangled. So many people with whom to untangle it. And, now, at least two places we can call home.
Anushka Bansal is a fourth-year in the College.
Correction, May 21, 2025, 11:30 p.m.: This article previously described a quote from philosopher Agnes Callard which paraphrased Aristotle as a quote from Aristotle.
