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In his Sept. 3 opinion “Embrace Hillsdale’s busyness. Life will only get busier,” senior Bradley Haley claims that busyness is an inevitable state of life and should be approached as an opportunity to grow in virtue. We already embrace busyness on Hillsdale’s campus, but we shouldn’t celebrate it. A healthier message for this student body is that your virtue does not lie in your busyness and that busyness may even get in the way of your growth as a human. 

The danger of praising busyness is that it may teach a student that she is a machine whose goal is maximum efficiency. In reality, her schedule is an expression of her interests and goals and there are many reasons it may include fewer obligations, like giving her more time to read for pleasure or better ingest her schoolwork. 

The grading system often indirectly teaches students how to memorize material in order to acquire a good grade rather than how to acquire the material itself; there is a similar danger in optimizing your schedule to include as many classes, extracurriculars, and social activities as possible instead of slowing down to better appreciate the experiences themselves.  

Haley says that “the thin cracks in my calendar are the spaces where virtue or vice come to the surface,” but there is a different way to live. We don’t have to experience life as one big overbooked, color-coded calendar with slices of free time here and there. 

In a statement accompanying a 1939 exhibition of oil paintings and pastels in New York, Georgia O’Keeffe wrote “Nobody sees a flower — really —  it is so small it takes time —  we haven’t time —  and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” 

Pursuing a liberal arts education is similar to seeing a flower: both are done in leisure and both help make you more human. Fifth-century Athens understood that the liberal arts can only be pursued in leisure because the things that make you fully human require time, space and contemplation. Schedule-maxxing defeats the purpose of your time at Hillsdale. Instead of adding that extra class you don’t need, try to see a flower. 

Maggie O’Connor is a junior studying art.