Monday, January 14, 2013

Thoughts on balancing schedules


Well, here I am. The first week of training is gone, and I’m only starting to comprehend how much juggling this project will require. The greatest challenge for me right now is making time to study, exercise and sleep. School and extracurriculars can really take up quite a lot of time. For example, one of my teachers recently assigned our class an end-of-semester project. Every night I would plan to start it, but would find that other homework and an hour of exercise took up all of my night. So I would give all my time to busywork and exercise, but ended up taking time away from those things later when I stayed up all night writing my culminating presentation. I regret this deeply, but I’m even more concerned that I was not shocked by this sudden late-nighter. The truth is, whether I have a culminating project or not, I don’t go to bed on time.
Now, as a junior in high school, I know the value of sleep. I’m an expert at how wrong things can go when you’re sleep deprived. I’ve reached a point where I could barely hold an intelligible conversation (luckily, the rest of my class was just as tired, so we basically spoke gibberish back and forth to each other, and no one cared). I know what it’s like to be so wrought with fatigue that walking makes me feel like I’ll puke. My feelings cannot be unique, and I’m sure most people would agree that that level of exhaustion is something to avoid at all costs. Unfortunately, I’m not really willing to pay the price for a good night’s sleep. Sleep is always the least of my concerns, which is why I’m currently questioning how I’ve prioritized my life.

So here’s my predicament: Do I 
a) slowly cut off years from my life by not sleeping, 
b) let my body waste away by never exercising, 
or c) fail all my classes by prioritizing schoolwork last? 
I have to sacrifice one of these, because I clearly can’t maintain all three. I hate having to make this decision because all of these activities are an important part of my life. In the end, I love them all equally, and hate the consequences of neglecting them. Ever since I really started to organize my life, I've always done it in a way that demands me to maintain an exercise routine, good grades, and sufficient sleep. This wasn't so impossible before, but now it seems like a foolish whim. This is reflected in many aspects of my life, including piano, which I can no longer practice, school, where I've developed a bit of an attitude because I’m so tired, and this blog.
If you go to the calendar section, you’ll see that I missed three days of training. What was I doing during this time? I was in my bed, enjoying the sweet pleasure of having my feet tucked under a duvet, and my cat purring on my stomach. This little indulgence felt fantastic at the time, but had later repercussions—namely that I wouldn’t leave my bed to train (really, who leaves a blanket and a happy cat to do sit-ups?). I also neglected to make any written posts on this blog, and I’m embarrassed about that too. I’m still unsure as to how I will reorganize my schedule and priorities, but I wanted to get rid of the guilt of failing to meet my goals. I hope this wasn’t too long of a first post, but I wanted to speak from the heart. I hope it showed J

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