Study Breaks

This past week was finals week. It was rough stuff. The hardest part is not the whopping tests but the struggle to stay motivated. School is like exploring a cave. You crawl, wiggle, and squeeze your way through the tightest of spaces hoping that someday it will end. Then finals come. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel and you have two options: continue army crawling through some sludge, or stand up and take the emergency exit to your right. That emergency exit is the study break. Sometimes it is necessary to maintain sanity, other times it is definitely unnecessary but very tempting. The challenge with taking that emergency exit out of the tunnel is summoning the will power to go back in there and slosh through the final hundred feet to the end. Imagine: You are on your belly, face barely above water, and you see the end. It is only a couple hours away. Your vision wanders to the right and you spot this red door with a bright green exit sign hanging above it. You know that if you go out that door you may never come back. It’s a risk. So what do you do? You yell YOLO and plow through the red exit, mentally resolving to go back to the tunnel in an hour or two.

Well that’s how it works folks. Study breaks. I took one such break the other day. I had just finished an exam that didn’t go well. Shimmying my way through more tunnels was the last thing I wanted to do. Now the day before my roommate jokingly said that I should rappel out the window. Perfect. Lets do it. I set up an anchor using two legs on the coffee table and bombed my rope out our 3^rd story window. My roommates all sat on the table to weigh it down and out I went. I exchanged waves with the boys on floor 2 as I went by, then I gracefully (sorta) landed in the bush at the bottom. I unhooked and raced upstairs to do it again. After two more trips I felt accomplished and decided to be done. I coiled the rope, gathered my gear, examined the pics, and then headed back into that dreadful tunnel.

A behind the scenes look.