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By Emily Davis
For the past couple years, I have fought hard to protect the habit of reading something for fun every night before I go to bed. Even if I can only read one page or even one paragraph before I feel my eyelids flickering shut, I try to give my brain a reprieve from the never-ending list of textbook chapters I must read through to keep up in class.
It is practically beneficial because it gives my mind a chance to unwind and shift its focus from the demands of school. But, more importantly, it is good for my soul. It reminds me that my mind does not exist solely for me to acquire knowledge and use that knowledge to pursue academic success. My mind exists to dream as well. If I starve my imagination, I may even destroy the intellectual curiosity that allows me to enjoy all the things I must read to do well in my classes.
I love learning. A consistent theme in my life is the pursuit of knowledge: going down all the rabbit holes of curiosity. I will always feel more comfortable in a classroom than at a party. I feel less anxious about asking a question during a lesson than introducing myself to a stranger. But the joy and comfort I find in my life as a student tempts me to define myself by academic achievement. If being a student is my entire identity, falling short of perfection in my classes, being rejected from graduate schools, or failing to achieve other academic goals I pursue means that I am not me. I wonder who I am, because the results of my work are not in line with who I believe I should be.
But I do not exist to make A’s in every class. I do not exist to get accepted into every graduate school I apply to. I do not exist to make and achieve academic goals. My mind is worth more than the things it can soak in. My mind is not just a consumer of knowledge, but a creator of ideas. Imagination is as much a part of me as the absorption of knowledge.
When I take a break to nourish my imagination, I am reminded that God created the world, and then he made mankind in his image. The Lord is creative, and because I am created in his image, I also exist to create. My true identity is not as a student, but as an image bearer of the Lord. And he reminds me that my failure can never rob me of this identity, because my good works were never the reason he gave me that identity in the first place.
So, even though every week brings a handful of quizzes, tests, homework assignments, and a hundred pages of class material to absorb, each night, you will find me with my nose in a book: reading by the light of my bedside lamp until my mind begins to wind down and I rest in my identity as an image bear of the Lord.
Emily Davis is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2022. She is studying business economics and mathematics at the University of Louisville.