Lately, several people have mentioned to me that I need to ‘get involved’ with different activities, and it has really started to bug me.  To give just one example, about a week ago, another graduate student I know was pressuring me to join the organizing committee for this yearly conference.  She had the idea that she could train me this coming year and then, when she was no longer at Oxford, I could take over.  I said no.  I mean, I did appreciate the conference (I even presented there this year), but I just wasn’t willing to give over that many hours of my time—they are too precious to me.

I was complaining to this to one of good friends here, about how I felt guilty for saying no but that it really wasn’t something I wanted to do. Her response was, ‘well it’s fine that you don’t want to do this conference—but you really should get more involved, just find something fun.’  Now, I know my friend meant well, but for some reason, this advice really irritated me.  I feel like people are constantly trying to get me to take part in and have responsibility for things that I really couldn’t care less about.  There seems to be this pervasive idea in our society that to be fulfilled you have to know a lot of people and attend a lot of events, and that if you do these two things you will be happy.  Someone who doesn’t is just, well, weird and they have no life.

Don’t get me wrong, I like having friends as much as anyone.  My friendship with the naughty princesses for one has been nothing but rewarding.  But somehow I think there is a difference between true friends, those that you are close to and share your life with, and having a lot of people who know you and maybe go the same events.  Really, I don’t feel like I need any more of the second type.  Instead of cultivating a wide social circle, I would rather put more time into the friends I have, making them better, deeper ones

I guess what bothers me so much in this whole question of being ‘involved’ is that it sets up these things: making friends and knowing people, as inherently more important than your solitary activities.  It is almost as though people forget that at Oxford we are here to be students, and really, to do good academic-level scholarship it takes a lot of time.   But yes, even when all the research has been done, of course still one has some free time.  But for me, I cherish that time.  In Roman times they had a word “otium.”  Otium is kind of hard to translate literally–it means ‘free time’ but not at all in the sense of time that does not matter.  Instead, otium was leisure time: a time free from labour, where one could do more important things like think and read.   For me, that is the time where I work on my German, or read, or journal.  It is time for examining my ideas and my philosophies.  I think that time is so important, so necessary and refining, that it really bothers me to see people treat it like it is nothing—as though its existence is a sign of some fault in your life, that your life is not full enough.  People are different, I am not denying that and I am not telling anyone how to live their life, but sometimes I just want to say, please, please, just let me and my otium be: we are happy how we are.