Life's not all about pulling the A's

By John Brannon

So I’m sitting at home last Sunday, and post-Super Bowl boredom has set in. It happens every year. I go to church in the morning, worship and spend time with friends. I come home around noon and relax.

A little while later a few people come over and all of a sudden there’s more food in my kitchen than I’ve seen all year. The game comes—and the game goes, and all of a sudden I’m at the other end of the bell curve.

So here I sit, two to three hours worth of homework to do with plenty of reading to boot, and I can’t get myself to go back to my room, and get to work. Have you ever had that feeling? You know what you should do, but you just can’t bring yourself to get responsible. I do it all the time, and I suppose that’s why I don’t have a higher GPA.

But then—I do have friends who would go so far as to skip the game—even if they were huge fans—to do some early semester homework that seems so vital in order to not fall behind in classes (you know who you are). I have six classes this semester, and I’ll tell you what, I’m really not all that concerned. I suppose I should be, considering the difficulty of some of the classes that I do have. Thank the good Lord for credit/no credit grading.

So how responsible should one be in college when it comes to classes and class work?

Professors will all say that it’s essential to be in class every day, and to study hard every night.

Riiiight.

I love it when people actually buy into that myth. And if it’s not a myth, what’s it actually worth? Is an A worth all the stress that goes with it? Is an A worth sacrificing time with friends, family, or in my case, playing the guitar?

Over the course of these past few years, I’ve learned one indelible fact: Life is too short to stress over getting an A. The time that you spend investing your life into someone else and into your own self-development is by far more important than any amount of studying one might do, or any amount of notoriety that might go with that studying.

Sure, it would be great to have that piece of paper that said I made the Dean’s List or graduated Cum Laude. But in the end, it’s a piece of paper. You won’t find self-worth in it, just like you won’t find self-worth in the “great” job that comes with that honor. A life well spent is spent with a wide range of activity—with studying a small aspect of it.

If anything comes from reading this, I would hope that it be this—at some point this semester, when it seems that there couldn’t possibly be enough time to study for that big test on Monday, play hooky from the books for a little while and have coffee with a friend, play basketball with a buddy, go for a jog, read a book that you actually enjoy, go to church, play that instrument that you love, surprise your girlfriend or boyfriend with flowers, e-mail that friend you haven’t talked to in a year, take a solo trip to the mountains, or just do nothing for a while. You’ll be surprised at what gets done.

— This columnist can be reached at collegian@csufresno.edu