The "work hard, play hard" formula of living practiced by Dartmouth students leaves little room for hugs.
Lunch dates are booked weeks in advance and sleep is a high-priced commodity. People ask me, "how are you?" as they stream by to their next daily engagement and I glibly respond, "good," even though I am usually slightly depressed, frustrated and lonely. Dartmouth students are not given much time to check in with each other or themselves. To begin to address these realities, Palaeopitus Senior Society is hosting the first ever Dartmouth Wellness Week today through Friday.
At Dartmouth, health is institutionally positioned as one more aspect of our lives to juggle. Many administrators at Dartmouth warn us about potential dangers to our bodies, tell us how to be safe and determine which of our actions are unhealthy.
Although well-intentioned, this prescriptive approach to health reinforces the idea that as long as we take the proper precautions and check them off of our to-do list, we will be healthy, happy and successful students.
Many of us adhere to this detached and impersonal picture of how to be healthy. With such a fast-paced and highly demanding environment, Dartmouth students conflate and compartmentalize health. We squeeze health into the "work hard, play hard" ethic: eat a good breakfast, study between classes, work out at the gym and know your limit at night.
As many can attest, this approach does not quite work. We are still not completely happy or comfortable with ourselves and the larger community. This is because health is not an individual achievement; measures of health are a function of our surroundings.
When health is seen as merely a set of rules we feel burdened to follow, we forget that our own health is affected more by the relationships in which we engage and less by how correctly we follow someone else's prescriptions to take care of ourselves.
For this reason, we need to take a more holistic approach to health. Health needs to be an initiative and priority of the community, not the individual. Our emotions, attitudes and opinions are the effects of the communities to which we belong.
We need more time to reflect on the connections between our academic pursuits, our modes of pleasure and what we think health means in our lives. Once we find these connections, it is possible that everything we do at Dartmouth could be geared toward making our lives better.
Hopefully, Wellness Week will help us find these connections. It is designed to encourage us to think about how we can begin to take control of how our own individual health is defined. With the help of administrators who specialize in particular areas of health, Palaeopitus is offering the student body an entire week dedicated to the countless number of ways to think about health.
In order to live in a healthy environment, we need to be concerned with the well-being of others in order to understand how to improve our own daily functioning. Wellness is a community endeavor.
Understanding health is a product of making connections between the personal and the societal. This is particularly important when our community is defined more by its ideological and political divides than its interest in making it possible for everyone to play and work in comfortable symbiosis.
I may disagree with other people's attitudes and opinions, but my desire for them to speak whatever is on their minds will only be increased if they would let me give them a hug before we debate. I will feel better at least.
