My Guide to a Busy Lifestyle: Time Machines and Outer Space

            Now that I have embedded myself in a Jenga-dangerous schedule of academic and extra curricular activities this fall, I wake up panicking.  Whenever things are busy, I come to my senses every morning with high blood pressure and my teeth clenched, worrying that I’m forgetting the books that I need for class, or that I’ll double book myself for meeting, or that I’ll disappoint someone who will be writing me letters of recommendation someday. Today I found a remedy for that.  It came to me during a discussion in Scientific Revolutions, and I scribbled, “wake up on Pluto” in my daily planner so that I wouldn’t forget about it later.  It’s a sort of quasi-meditation activity to make me feel better when I am feeling like the Pentagon will implode if I don’t post my online response to the reading questions 3 days before it’s due.   

            Before you start the process, make sure you have someplace moderately relaxing and where you won’t feel self-conscious for closing your eyes.  (Just put your earbuds in and pretend you are sleeping).  It’s a good mental exercise to do when you wake up or anytime throughout the day that you find yourself panicking. 

            First picture yourself on Pluto.  Stereotypes work.  I’m thinking about cratery purple terrain and frigidness.  As soon as you get the feeling of being on Pluto take one giant jump through space and land on Neptune.  Then, before your other foot even has time to touch the ground, push off onto Uranus.  When you land on Uranus, say the Uranus/Your Anus joke once to yourself, and then skip to Saturn and Jupiter.  Dive face first through the asteroid belt and do some sort of cartwheelish gymnastics move over Mars and onto Earth.  Just so you know, you landed on Earth in year infinity BC and time is now moving at 5,000 years per second.  Before your eyes plants spring up, and then animals, and then dinosaurs.  Eventually, you see a caveman inventing a wheel, which rolls into Greeks statues, the renaissance, the Revolutionary War, and BAM it’s you being born.  Now your entire life zips before your eyes in exactly one second.  Any more time than a second is boring and difficult, so get yourself to the present pronto.  Congratulations, you have just traveled through an immense amount of space and time. 

            Now picture the current set of problems that you have to fix.  They should feel small in comparison.  If not, keep worrying, because there is probably about to be a nuclear explosion or something extremely monumental about to happen.  If your problems do seem more manageable, get to work.  And if you can, give all those planets and history a tiny, tiny nudge.