Dear Class of 2015,
You are more than halfway done with your semester. That means, as you remember from the last eight times this happened, that you are exhausted, overworked, under-slept, sick, anxious, no longer enchanted with your strange new classes, seriously pondering the next break, and occasionally feeling like you’re in over your head. You may have lost sight of some of the wonder and terror that the new semester brought a couple months ago. You may have fallen into some routines. You may even have found it difficult to imagine finishing what you started. But the end shines somewhere in the distance. The projects that seem impossible to finish will happen somehow before the year is done. The material you are studying will soon be in your past. Already, you’re beginning to plan for next semester.
You happen to be in the same place with your entire college career: just past the halfway mark, just now mostly done with your college experience but with enough of it remaining that you are deeply in the thick of it. Some of your mid-semester feelings may echo a greater liminality. How will you plan for what comes next — grad school, work, travel — while still attending to your day to day thinking, writing, reading, calculating, and finding time in there for balance? How do you deal with the sheen of newness wearing off college, and what lies underneath?
I find it helpful in these times to step back and look at where I’ve come from and where I seem to be going. The present moment, with its work and pleasure, its plainness or its intensity, is all we ever have. Yet that present was shaped by the past, and what we do now will determine how our trajectory goes forward.
I can remember a moment from the fall of my Junior year, challenged and stimulated and anxious, uncertain about the future, when everything that had come before seemed somehow inevitable but when everything that would come next seemed impossible to believe. From my perspective now, that was a crucial turning point when I discovered, walking through the trees on campus, reading a book, thinking about ideas, that I wanted to be a college professor. I realized that all the difficulties and surprises and delights that had happened in my first two years were telling me what I cared about and where to put my energy and attention.
The moment was an epiphany and peaceful. It did not arise from a place of meticulous planning and foreknowledge; rather, I felt a sense of waking up after a fitful dream filled with great anxiety. It felt like taking a fresh breath, and seeing the light through the leaves of the trees overhead, the feeling of the earth underfoot, the sensation that I knew where to walk, and how to walk, and why. Looking back, that may have been one of the most important moments in my life, but it wasn’t “special” at all — just a sudden awareness of the present and sense of purpose in fulfilling a trajectory that had been building, mostly unconsciously, through books and classes and plays and conversations and encounters and struggles and projects and meetings with remarkable professors and long walks alone and long nights with friends.
My advice: wake up! You’re here, right now, and you won’t be much longer. You’ve done things, seen things, struggled through and enjoyed and been transformed by your life, and your Trinity career, so far. Look down at the ground. Notice your feet. You are going somewhere. Where? Look up at the trees. You are here for a reason: to learn, to discover, to reach up, to become who you are and what the world needs. You have done more at Trinity than there is left to do. All the work ahead of you is worth it. And it is exciting. You will finish what you started and launch yourself toward what’s next, which could be anything.
Kyle Gillette
Class Marshal
Class Marshal
