This year, Yale’s family weekend may have been the highlight of my semester.

My family didn’t make it to campus, in part because of the length of intercontinental flights from India but more likely because of my repeated threats to take them to an improv show. And while I hope someday to show them Yale at its glossiest, their absence was propitious. Freed from the obligation to show a place I love to the people whose wings I flew here on, I could be a dilettante for a weekend — dabbling in a cappella, British art and musical improv comedy. I sampled the most delectable offerings both from Yale’s smorgasbord of activities and from the cocktail menus of restaurants I went to with my parent’s friends. And if two years of waxing lyrical about my friends at Yale doesn’t imply this sufficiently, I relished the chance to meet the people who created them. 

Beginning Friday, I wore my best clothes — ready to impress any chance encounters on Cross Campus with my sartorial elegance. I manufactured serendipity, “perusing” my most impressive tomes under the most conspicuous trees on campus — outside WLH and in the Sterling Courtyard — ensuring I would inextricably be associated with Walter Benjamin and Coleridge. And I poured through each page of the Times that week, primed to intellectually spar with any alumnus who wanted to quiz me on recent controversies at New York University, how Kwame Onwuachi spends his Sundays or all things Basquiat. 

The real reason it was such a perfect weekend, though, had nothing to do with the presence of doting parents. Nor was it its novelty, its triumphant return after three years. It was simply that for one weekend, Yale’s culture of productivity was lifted. For one weekend, Bass became as much a tourist attraction as it was a place to cry about physics exams. For one weekend, I did not wake up thinking of the essays I had to write, or of the flat, orange blocks of productive time on a calendar, interspersed with scheduled meals and scheduled parties. I woke up thinking of the things I could see, if I was so resolved. I would finally fulfill my promise to see the concert band live, to step foot inside my Head of College’s house for the first time, to attend dinners that bled over into forbidden parts of the night. And for once, my joy was untainted by guilt.

I walked, nay skipped, through campus, my resolve to ignore work for a weekend redoubled by the smiling faces I saw around me. And I was not alone. As our eyelids fluttered open on Friday morning, so many of us felt a sea-change in our priorities — unfettered by the cycle of productivity to which we are otherwise so shackled. I lived a month in two days. I reminisced about freshman year with my freshman roommate’s mum, I learned more about maps than I ever thought possible and I nourished an innocuous crush that still makes my heart flutter every time I think about it. I spent the weekend smiling continuously. 

I do not expect life at Yale to ever resemble that weekend again. It was a moment of divine grace, bolstered by my love for college life and a schedule that sanctioned freedom from graded assignments for those three days. But it is disappointing how quickly life has lurched back to the other extreme.

Tears at 2 a.m. on the Friday night of fall break, fearing the deluge of work that awaits me when I return and the unavoidable truth that I must work all weekend to indulge in any Halloween plans or performances the following week. The crushing realization that no matter how much I try to put life before work, I cannot do it all. Feeling sick to my stomach when a professor gives back an essay that Thursday, his summary comment beginning with the phrase “despite your bizarre insistence that the Abbey and the Valley are one place and the equally bizarre insistence that memorializing the poem is his project.” 

I will always be both those people — the person who writes sonnets exhorting his classmates to capitalize on college life’s absurd, fleeting opportunities and the person whose self-esteem is still tied to depersonalized metrics of academic, extracurricular and professional success. The person who wants to drop one extracurricular, who wants more free “filler” time to listlessly chat at 4 p.m. in his common room with the people he loves, and the person who fears that nobody else would ever do that for him — that nobody else would give up the promise of a new “opportunity” at Yale simply for more time to run into him. 

My vision of Yale is filtered through rose-coloured glasses, but it is also mediated through a veil of productivity. In rare moments, I find the strength to lift the veil, to marvel at the best of Yale — at the Harvard-Yale Game, on family weekend, on Halloween.  In other moments, I am suffocated by it; drowning in never-ending work, scared that I am running out of time to achieve or experience something truly profound here, distracted as I am by the details of prosaic student life. If I cannot lift the veil, then, what I need is a new set of eyes. To peek into the world of Yale through the eyes of a doting parent, of a supportive best friend, to remember the thrill of being here, now, surrounded by such incredible people, that I felt on family weekend. So that when I am back at my lowest moments, crippled by the same anxieties about work, academic validation and the future, I can call on the memories of my briefly altered vision — to enrich the present and remember how much more life can be. 

PRADYUMNA SAPRE is a junior in Benjamin Franklin college. His column, titled ‘Growing pains’, runs every other Monday.