Spring break is a time for discovery and exploration

Pausing is important. Pausing allows us to be present, to take stock of how far we’ve come, where we are and where we need to go. The act of pressing pause seems almost necessary when the business and tiredness of daily life is recognized. To many, the upcoming Spring Break represents just that. An opportunity to pause, to rest, to take stock.

But even as we contemplate our imminent departure from the daily grind, let us give some thought to what exactly pausing means. Is pausing truly a state of nothingness, a blank space in between two disjoint chapters of life? Perhaps a better way to think of pausing is as a temporary suspension of our everyday agenda. To give ourselves the chance to look inward and channel our energy toward discovering and exploring.

What might we fill this “in-between” space with? Cast aside thoughts of catching up with work or getting ahead before semester restarts. All of these merely extend or bring forward the stressors and complexities of the experience we have to manage on a daily basis. Think instead about things that have been forgotten, collecting dust in some corner of our lives, things that we’ve always wanted to do but never got around to.

These are the precious moments that allow us to find our way, to find ourselves.

Given the space, our minds naturally return to what we deem important. It might be reconnecting with a friend who we’ve lost contact with but still care deeply for. It might be spending time cooking our family a meal to thank them for supporting us all this time. It might be doing something for a special someone to remind them of the impact they’ve had on our lives.

This space is easily crowded out by the best of plans and intentions. We are far too often caught up in our own schedules that we leave little time for anything else. This is a reminder to embrace spontaneity just as we would #EmbracetheS. Just as celebrating uniqueness and what makes us different is important, giving ourselves the flexibility to spend our time on things that present themselves is similarly important.

Specific to Spring Break, a step toward pausing and being present might be to challenge ourselves to do something we otherwise wouldn’t do. This could be trying a new café that opened in our neighborhood, getting to know new neighbors who just moved in during the past semester at college, attending a music or art event which we might not have considering doing in the past.

Uniting every one of these possibilities is the prospect of uncertainty. We don’t know whether that new café would be good, we don’t know if our new neighbors will be friendly, we don’t know if we’ll be able to appreciate the music or art we are exposed to at the event we might attend. But herein lies the beauty of the pause. We lead our lives pursuing aims that we spend our lives trying to articulate. To temporarily depart from this path demands us to dare to be uncertain.

Even for those of us spending Spring Break here at Hopkins, familiar environments do not hinder the possibilities of discovery and exploration. There is always the option of exploring one of Baltimore’s neighborhoods, including those surrounding our Homewood Campus. Few know that the area between the Penn Station and Homewood contains 10 neighborhoods (between Charles and Greenmount). Each neighborhood has its own character, exploring them will be different and exciting.

Ultimately, a pause is an opportunity for discovery and for exploration. It is an opportunity that empowers us to spend time doing something different, something uncertain. It is an opportunity to revisit old interests and perhaps find new ones. These are the precious moments that allow us to find our way, to find ourselves, to find ourselves again. Let us not waste them by forgetting to discover and explore.

Tommy Koh is a sophomore psychology and political science double major from Singapore.