Don't Kill the Muse

I'm tired. Often, as high school students, that can seem to simply be our natural state, feeling constantly stressed and swamped with work. So it can be easy to pass off reading and writing as wastes of time, and to instead simply grind away through assignments with no regard for personal mental health and time for real thought. Recently reading through the book Fahrenheit 451 for my English class, I found myself in quite an ironic situation. I came across a chapter in which a professor, espousing on the wonder of books, decrees that literature is so special because it can both capture the human experience and, since it is simply consumed at our own paces, allows time for pause and thought. As I read this I was already stressing about the multiple assignments I had left to do after my reading, and as such felt greatly rushed and distracted as I made my way. I could not think. As writers, we cannot simply allow such things to happen to us. We cannot let ourselves get totally sucked into day to day work and tasks so that we set aside no time for reading and writing and leisurely thought. If we do not do so, we will undoubtedly kill the creative muses within us. So many of us seek to be high achieving, and to live productive lives, but never really stop to think about just how much experiencing art and giving ourselves just a bit of time to pause, to tap into our creative selves, to sit down for a moment with a pen and pad of paper and not a screen in sight, can really matter. In my experiences, relatively short in years as they may be, the really meaningful part of life is when we are doing what we love. That is what will allow us to be truly happy, and is something for many hard workers and "high achievers" like myself to keep in mind (not that being a high achiever has to be in conflict to doing what you love, by any means).