We’ve built a culture that treats busyness as a badge of honor. At the University of California, Riverside (UCR) — like most universities — the rhythm of our days is measured in deadlines, discussion posts and the number of unread Canvas notifications waiting for us.
Students are constantly sprinting from lecture halls to labs, calendars are packed and their minds are endlessly bracing for the next thing. Yet, somewhere between the 8 a.m. coffee and the midnight study session, many of us feel something quietly slipping away: our sense of wonder.
We as college students talk a lot about ambition and resilience, the drive to excel to “make it.” We live in an age that rewards efficiency over curiosity, productivity over play. Every hour seems to demand justification in our minds: “What are you achieving? Where are you going? What’s next?” But what about the equally important act of slowing down? What about the courage to be curious, to play, to find beauty that doesn’t need to justify itself on a résumé?
That’s where whimsy comes in.
Somewhere between the crowded lecture halls and the silent study rooms, we have lost the art of simply being, or embracing the whimsy for its own sake. Whimsy is often overlooked as something unimportant, too unproductive for a world obsessed with outcomes. But in truth, it’s a form of resistance. 
To embrace whimsy is to reclaim control over how we move through life — to reject the idea that worth is measured only in achievement and to remember that creativity, joy and curiosity are not distractions from success but the ground it grows from.
At UCR, whimsy already lives in small, almost secret ways. It’s the student who brings a ukulele to the Bell Tower lawn between classes. It’s the impromptu picnic outside Orbach Library on a sunny afternoon. It’s the quiet laughter echoing through the dorms at 2 a.m. These moments might seem fleeting, but they sustain us. They remind us that college isn’t just a waiting room for the “real world” — it is the world and it deserves to be lived fully.
Embracing whimsy doesn’t mean rejecting ambition. It means broadening our definition of it. Success should include the courage to pause, to create for the sake of creating, to take joy seriously. When people wander back into their routines, they become not only better students but also more present human beings.
That’s what embracing the whimsy really means: giving yourself permission to live a little more like a poem and a little less like a checklist. To let the ordinary moments shimmer again.
Today’s world demands that each individual be efficient. But, in small ways, people should choose to be enchanted instead. So, the next time you find yourself racing across campus, look up. Watch the leaves fall like confetti. Listen to the rhythm of the day — the laughter, the footsteps, the distant hum of the bell tower. Ask someone about the pins on their backpack.
Let yourself do something “pointless,” simply because it feels alive. Notice how the world, even in its chaos, keeps offering tiny invitations to joy.
You might realize that the moments you’ve been overlooking are the ones you’ll remember the most because life isn’t just about where we’re headed. It’s about how we let ourselves live — curiously, kindly and with a hint of the beautiful, fleeting whimsy of it all.
