Alexandra Hill ’28 is a prospective English major and creative writing minor. She does research at the IIC Conservation GIS lab and is a member of Vox. Contact her at abhill@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
“Remember this: work hard, play hard.”
It’s been 24 hours since you tossed your cap in the air, and you’ve heard this no less than seven times. You can hardly stop yourself from rolling your eyes. Of course, it’s high school graduation, and meaningless pieces of advice are being tossed out like candy, so you’ve already mastered your cheesy smile.
“Thanks,” you say. “I’ll try.”
Maybe “work hard, play hard” is just a soon to-be-forgotten nugget of wisdom. However, it infiltrates college life on a deeper level. Someone who subscribes to the “work hard, play hard” philosophy becomes the dream college student — a favorite in the classroom and at the fraternities.
Our elders share those four words frequently, often in a nostalgic air. Perhaps it is because adults are expected to give up “play” entirely in order to grow up. Once they enter the hustle of working life, the door to fun remains firmly shut. After all, they are too busy for their days to be filled with anything more than the monotony of work.
However, the same toxic hustle underlies “work hard, play hard.” The student embracing a “work hard, play hard” mindset is seen in the library or the club, with a book or a beer. There is no in-between. They lose sleep cramming for a test, then lose sleep partying. They are expected to maintain a high GPA and a demanding social life. Their weekdays are packed, and so are their weekends.
Fighting to keep up with the standard of “work hard, play hard” is a one-way road to burnout.
Yet, deleting either half of the slogan makes things worse. If you are constantly locked in the library, you will slowly disintegrate under Swem’s ferocious fluorescent lighting. On the flip side, if you spend your days getting wild on the dance floor, it seems highly unnecessary that you are paying tuition to do so.
So, I offer a revision. Work hard, sure. Play hard, heck yeah! But don’t forget to rest hard.
That’s right, rest. Catch some Zs, first of all, but also remember to add rest to your waking hours.
“Rest” means something different to everybody. For me, it’s walking around Colonial Williamsburg and discovering something new (i.e. the spooky cellar at the Governor’s Palace). It’s reading a rom-com. It’s making an ugly painting and being proud of it anyway.
While rest refreshes you for more work and more play, it should also be respected on its own. Rest is the space where the world falls quiet, where you slow down enough that you can pick something you’ve never noticed out of all of the noise.
The other day, I encountered a maple tree that looked like it had unfolded from a pop-up book. Orange and yellow sprouted from its branches like monarch wings, fluttering in the breeze. I stopped in my tracks, trying to take it all in. It was the sort of beauty you could stare at for hours and still not feel like you truly appreciated.
I had a club meeting to be at soon, homework to do. Yet, there was a bench under the magical canopy, asking passersby to wait a moment, to slow down and look up.
So, I did. I laid down and folded my arms behind my head and watched as the leaves waved and shook above, getting ready to say their farewells to the branches. I sat there until time escaped. One more song, I kept thinking. My playlist went on. I did not.
I walked by there again this week, and the leaves were no longer a yellow so bright I felt like I needed sunglasses. They now looked like crumpled paper bags, and most of them laid in a heap around the trunk. No less beautiful, but I suddenly felt so grateful I had taken a moment to sit down and rest on the bench that day, ignoring my other responsibilities. The same maple now looked unrecognizable.
Moments of rest can elude us if we don’t use the pockets of time we have. We can fail to save space for ourselves, in the rush of college and in the rush of life. We can forget to “rest hard.”
You never know when the leaves will fall, so stop and treasure them now.