The term “lazy Sunday” exists for a reason, and this past Sunday was a particularly lazy one for me. I had planned to get at least some amount of homework done, but that didn’t end up happening. I felt no motivation to do anything productive, and yes, I could have forced myself to get something done, but I knew it wouldn’t be my best work because I was not in the right headspace. So instead of pretending to do work, I decided to devote the day to self-care and watched The Lord of the Rings. I don’t think that anything, whether it be homework or any other sort of responsibility, should be done “just to get it done.” If this is the mindset you have when completing something, then nothing will be gained from it.
While I was watching The Two Towers, I noticed that one of the characters, Treebeard, repeated this one line multiple times: “Don’t be hasty.” In the movie, two hobbits Merry and Pippin are urging Treebeard to help them fight Saruman, but it takes a while for Treebeard and his fellow Ent to speak the Ent language. Because of this, they spend a lot of time discussing whether or not to help in the fight against Saruman. The hobbits urge Treebeard multiple times to hurry up, but he simply replies with, “Don’t be hasty.”
As I was watching the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about that one line. It could be applied to a wide range of situations, but recently one of the main things constantly on my mind has been essays/blog posts that I need to write. I thought about that line “Don’t be hasty,” in terms of my own workload and it made me realize that while I do have a lot of things to write, it’s important that I do my best not to rush any of them. This is something that is in the syllabus for this course: we were urged to not attempt getting our blog posts “out of the way” in the beginning of the semester, and to instead pace ourselves. I now realize how important it is to stay on top of floating deadlines (because I haven’t been). But I’m not going to beat myself up for mistakes I made—the only positive thing I can do is learn from them. I’m also not going to feel guilty for taking a day to myself this past Sunday, because I don’t think we should beat ourselves up for taking a break.
Coincidentally, on Monday I came across something my favorite author, Victoria Schwab, had posted on twitter. She said:
“Some days are typing days, and some days are thinking days, but both days are writing days.”
When I saw this, it reminded me of how Dr. McCoy often tells us to brainstorm while we’re walking, or to take a break from writing to think things through. It can be hard to not measure work through what’s physically on a page though. I know that a lot of writing is brainstorming, but it can be easy to forget this from time to time. This tweet was a welcome reminder and made me realize that I actually did get work done on Sunday. If I hadn’t taken the time to watch The Two Towers, I never would have been inspired to write this blog post. Sunday was simply a thinking day instead of a typing day.