Mary Jane in B-School

This past weekend, a very strange thing happened. It started off pretty poor. Friday night, after 5 hours of meeting with my consulting project group and coming up with our presentation slides, I trudged home at about midnight to sleep for a few hours before heading to Gleacher the next day to present. I spent half the day at Gleacher sitting through presentations - not normally my activity of choice in downtown Chicago on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

I decided to spend some time hanging out that evening with a friend visiting from out of town. We chatted, played games, watched a movie - it was such a welcome break from the constant grind of the past month.

Here's the strange bit. After goofing off on Saturday, I had loads of work to do for Sunday - so much reading to catch up on, so many items on the 'to do' list. But Sunday morning I woke up feeling completely relaxed. I realized that I finally "got" it, and as a result I'm no longer a stresscase about school. No epiphany (or tokes) involved in this transformation, its all common sense. I stopped worrying about the countless little things, and just thought about the few big ones. Marketing study group meeting tonight, Accounting HW to do before tomorrow. Sure, I could get to the other stuff, but only if I have time and energy. If not, oh well. Sound like apathy or just becoming numb to the whole grind? I'm sure there's a bit of that. But mostly, I stopped sweating it all and only felt it necessary to deal with a few key pieces of the puzzle.

The only event that I can attribute to this change is my chill night on Saturday. Until then, I was wound up ridiculously tight - little hamster running in circles nonstop on the big GSB wheel. It took being wound up that tight and a hiatus from the wheel for me to realize that it just wasn't worth it to get back on 24-7. There will be times when I'm running for a while, but taking time off is so key to my happiness and ability to see the forest instead of just the trees. I'm so glad that this happened before company presentations started...