Walkin' on Sunshine

I think it’s a pretty cruel, yet subtle, torture that this university employs, putting windows in classrooms. If, by chance, your mind wanders away from the professor’s riveting lecture or conversation and you glance out the window. Blue skies, sunshine, and no St. Thomas Aquinas await you there. Unfortunately, you’re already in class.

“Come,” the sunshine seems to call to me in class. “Come outside. I have Vitamin D for you. Come play outside, or at least don’t be in class!” “Okay!” I answer, and then realize that the class is laughing and the professor is glaring. Only one logical way to keep this (hypothetical) situation from happening: don’t go to class the next time.

I’m gonna have a really hard time going to class towards the end of this semester, assuming of course that the weather ever gets and stays nice. Which is a pretty big assumption here. Today, winter coats seem like a joke, but two days ago it was snowing so badly it looked like a Head & Shoulders commercial. Of course, then I didn’t want to walk through the snow to get to class, either. I just can’t win.

Today it took everything I had to go to class, and it wasn’t even that nice outside. As soon as it’s good enough weather I’ll be able to rationalize ‘studying’ at the dunes. Yeah, studying equals, uh, sitting on sand and walking in water. Maybe as a Theo field trip: attempting to walk on water?

There are always a million things that are better to do than to go to class, and one of the great things about college is that it gives you the freedom to choose. Honestly, when you look back on your years in college, are you going to say, “Hmm. I wish I’d spent more time in class. I just can’t get enough riveting conversation about calculus.” Or “Hmm. I wish I’d avoided having no friends and that pesky Vitamin D deficiency by skipping class and going somewhere sunny with my friends.” You make the call.

Maybe spending spring break somewhere warm will get this desire out of my system. Surely after a week in the warm Florida sun I will have had enough and be quite sick of it. I will come back to school ready to buckle down and do some hardcore homework and studying. Riiight. Or, it’ll make me wonder why I chose to go to school in Hail-pour-rain-snow Indiana.

So the next time that the sunshine is calling your name, answer it. Go out and enjoy it while it’s there. Outside is always a good time. And if you take that ‘answer it’ part literally, and hold conversations with the sunshine during class, perhaps you’ll get to spend some time in a nice institution with some other people who talk to the voices in the sunshine. Either way, you get out of class.