Owning Time

Blog 3 
Donna Hoang 
Jean Valjean was unable to experience true liberty after his release because he had to carry around a 
yellow passport. After researching what this passport symbolized, I learned that prisoners had a carry 
around this passport so that others could identify him as a convict. This serves as a constant reminder to 
Jean Valjean that he can only be a criminal, causing him to act like one. His identity is shaped by an 
outside force, and his time outside of prison was dictated by their labels. I believe that the real gift that 
the Bishop gave to Jean Valjean was the opportunity to own his time by being a good man, an act that can 
bring a great amount of internal conflicts.

The idea of owning time as a student of ND was a concept that was foreign to me. Although I do not have 
the labels of a yellow passport, I do carry around a label of being an ND student, and as amazing as that 
label may sound at first, the weight and pressure that comes with it ruins the education that I am suppose 
to be receiving. There is a silent expectation that we will graduate to have a high paying and prestigious 
job so that we can become a valuable alumni that will then help other ND students fit this same mold. 
When this becomes the ultimate end, creating a resume becomes more important than learning, and 
networking becomes more important than a genuine and honest conversation.

Last semester, I struggled greatly because of these pressures. I basically let my Google calendar drag me 
around and dictate the time that I had for the day. I let outside forces convince me that what I wanted in 
life was something radically different from what I had envisioned, and as a result, I signed up for a bunch 
of extracurricular activities that made me MISERABLE. When I finally realized that I had lost control 
of my own time, there was this sense of internal chaos and insecurity that started to kick in. I was so 
used to being told what to do with my time that I didn’t know how to own it. The idea of owning it was 
so scary that it was honestly more comfortable to do what the career center told me to do.

Because it was so uncomfortable to even give the thought of being something other than the label, I fell 
into the same trap that Jean Valjean fell into: the trap of allowing others to dictate how your time should 
be used. The idea of owning time may be foreign, but the alternative of allowing my time to be dictated 
by these pressures from my experience was just miserable. Although I may not have a Bishop who helps 
me understand what it means to own time, I am hoping that reflections, such as this post, can serve as a 
personal reality check when the temptations of comfort become hard to resist.

Comments

  1. jdoutFebruary 22, 2018 at 3:52 AM

    Sobering thoughts, Donna. Thank you for sharing. I'm prompted to paste below some words of wisdom I've gathered for you all on the "Reflect on this" handout (Sakai):
    "Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choices and must accept the consequences."
    I applaud the self-awareness you have gained, and hope you will remember the advice of Twyla Tharp going forward: "Limit input!" Only you can do that for yourself. Years from now, no one will care what extracurriculars you participated in at ND and you yourself will likely forget them too. But the seeds of deep reflection will grow, if you calm your lifestyle sufficiently to let them take root.

    ReplyDelete

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