That Recurring Nightmare About Final Exams.

Everyone has their own, unique “worst nightmares.” Here’s one:

“I meet Rock Star Hunk on a romantic beach in the South Pacific. He talks to me. I smile. He says, ‘You have a leaf of lettuce dangling from the tip of your tongue and a poppyseed stuck between your two front teeth.’ He reaches into my mouth and plucks away the lettuce, then goes after the poppyseed, loosening the caps on my two front teeth. Drool drips from my tongue. Rock Star Hunk cleans his hand in the surf and while he’s not looking, I rearrange the caps I bought at the Dollar Store onto my teeth. There’s a shark. It strikes, taking off Rock Star Hunk’s hand in one chomp. Rock Star Hunk bleeds to death and when the shark smiles, there are poppyseeds stuck between every blood-stained tooth.”

Here’s some more worst nightmares, but these ones are not unique. If you attended college or university, chances are these bad dreams have revisited you through the years that have come to pass since those halcyon days of your youthful education. The nightmares are souvenirs of stress. They remind us that higher education wasn’t always idyllic. It was often frantic:

“I dreamed I showed up for my final exam and it was the wrong exam because I never attended the class.”

“I dreamed I slept through my final exam because I was taking speed the night before to study.”

“I dreamed I never got my college degree because I forgot my name, my social security number, and my purpose in life and I was so hungry, (because I’d been chewing on coffee grounds for days and days), that I ate my exam blue book and my #2 pencil, which I forgot to sharpen.”

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It’s final exam season again. It’s also springtime. America’s best and brightest students are under the guillotine. The blade is menacing—reflecting cruel combinations of warm sunshine mixed up with disheartening distress. This ritual of brain growth—study, pass, or hand over your head—has been happening for a long time. But every generation is convinced the pressure has never been so intense, so unreasonable, and so unmanageable.

Stress can lead to some serious mental breakdowns. Most of us can laugh–now–at the recurring final exam nightmares that harass us. But hopefully we haven’t forgotten how it felt to believe we were about to ruin our entire lives, because we weren’t prepared mentally and physically to endure the pressure of finals. For a lot of students, stress must be managed in tandem with other mental, physical, and social challenges.

It has never been easy to be a college or university student.

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Our daughter, who is midway through the brain and body torture of final exams, needed a lifeline. So we visited and brought a picnic.

She attends a land-grant university. Few places are more perfectly set up to offer the stressed-out coed some au natural comforts.

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Land grant universities evolved in America around the 1850’s, when a social movement that supported higher education for the public began to gain attention. America’s education system, at that time, copied European models. Those models largely served to educate elite members of society within a class system that groomed students to become sedentary members of the government, or the palace, or the private schools.

American thinkers appealed for a system of higher education that would be more accessible to all and serve the people. It would be funded through the sale of government land and it would focus on agriculture and the mechanic arts, as well as classical studies. In other words, the education would serve the people and the country by promoting knowledge of the sciences, industry, and home economics. This model for education for the working class is all the rage now. Though we think curriculums are shifting in response to the perceived brilliance of kids in Singapore, (STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), I believe the core fundamentals for these kinds of studies were established at land-grand universities in America.

Every state in the union has at least one land-grant university. We are all beneficiaries of their existence.

Furthermore, the existence of schools throughout America—both public and private—that honor broad ranges of academic studies makes this country, by far, a land of dynamic educational opportunity and choice.

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The perfect break from the pressure of final exams should include exercise, sunshine, healthy food, a caring community of family and friends, restful peace, and

ANIMALS.

Many land grant universities are blessed with the natural resources to settle an out-of-control mind. Tapestries of agricultural fields and pastures roll away and up to the sky. Airy cow barns at my daughter’s university remain open to the public for delightful visits. Horses await visitors and will nod their heads over the fence. Sheep stand around acting bored. Dairy cows take a break from pumping out cartons of legendary ice creams. These are some of the original therapy pets of humankind and we never stop marveling at how big the animals can be, yet how gentle their dispositions are. The animals trigger memories of storybooks and childhood visits to farms all across America.

There might also be some gentle walking paths over hillsides leading to relaxing vistas where fresh-air breezes, tainted with the scents of newborn animals and freshly-planted flower beds, brush through your hair and keep the bugs away. Clouds and kites fly in unobstructed airspaces, sharing the sky with hidden stars waiting their turn to sparkle and ease tension after the sun sets.

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Getting close to family, friends, and animals, in a separate place of peace during times of stress, increases the output of happiness hormones.

Animals are the true rock stars—they never fail to lift our spirits and transport all of us back to the realities of what’s most important in life.

So here we are again. It’s springtime. It’s final exam season.

It’s also the time of year to start keeping a couple of chairs and a picnic blanket in the car.

I hope these pictures make you smile, because that was our goal when we visited our stressed-out daughter in the middle of her final exams. According to a study by psychologists at the University of Kansas, the nation’s first land grant university to be established under the Morrill Act of 1862, smiling lowers the heart rate, reduces stress, and increases well being.

Genuine smiles, that include using the eye muscles, are the best. The cows made our daughter smile the most, putting a nice twinkle back into her weary eyes.

Maybe there’s a land grant university near you. Consider taking a picnic over there the next time you need a dose of au natural therapy.

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