Shhh


As the sun sets on my four-year undergraduate study of human health, I find I can summarize my learning quite succinctly: Eat well, sleep well, exercise. Behold, the foundation of my formal education; the simple tenets of healthy living. Naturally, as a full-time college student with two part-time jobs, I keep up on project deadlines, final exams, graduate school interviews, community and church service, all while fully living up to that creed to eat well, sleep well, and exercise.

Ha.

Just kidding.

Decembers can be particularly rough with the hustle and bustle of the season, accompanied by my poor coping skills, and more recently my senioritis. It's hard to manage all the tests and the presentations and the grocery shopping and the patients trying to meet their deductibles; not to mention the cookies that need delivering next door, and those special gifts that need to be got! Sometimes I become so preoccupied with the urgent “to-do’s” of each day, I even fail to practice what my university education has taught me: to eat well, sleep well, and exercise.

If I’m not careful high external demands lead to self-neglect. (I'm sure you've never done that.) Sometimes, I just don't feel like I can help it. I run out of time, I forget, I forgo, I lose focus. I'm human. And when there are so many good things to choose from, how do I even know what's best? Oh, if only I knew how to do it all...

But since I don’t—

I crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling and contemplate the ironies of my life: I took a test on how my body converts food to energy, but forgot to eat breakfast. I fell asleep in a lecture about narcolepsy. I can smooth out the knots and kinks in my patients’ sore backs, but I can’t get rid of mine. At a time for all Christians to celebrate the peace and relief brought by the humble Nativity, how often have I neglected to be still or feel relieved.

While I don't anticipate the demands of life to subside any time soon—or like, ever—I appreciate the words from Elder D. Todd Christofferson to an arena full of stressed out students: “Take time to relax, be at peace, and see this little child in your mind. Do not be too concerned or overwhelmed with what is coming in His life or in yours. Instead, take a peaceful moment to contemplate perhaps the most serene moment in the history of the world—when all of heaven rejoiced with the message ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men’ (Luke 2:14).”

I hope that in our lives—no matter how many "to do" lists we face—we can take some time to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. But more than that I hope we can take time to be still, to relax, to appreciate the gifts of the season, and enjoy those little moments in life which tend to matter most.

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