For me, the spring progression towards the end of school – this time of year –has always kind of felt like falling off a cliff. At the same time that you’re cramming desperately for exams, you suddenly start remembering that school is not necessarily the full length and breadth of life. A certain melancholy might set in, as you remember on emotional level that the boundaries between which you live, the standards of success and failure that create your day-to-day requirements, are not only made up, but made up by someone who isn’t you. So how do you keep your sense of autonomy within the structure of the academic world? And what do you do when that structure dematerializes in a day?
Last night, two of my friends sat in the Michigan House kitchen and talked about dropping out of college. Ana had stopped attending school a year ago, while Isaac was thinking about dropping out next fall. “The hardest part about it,†said Ana, “is dealing with other people. If you’re not terrified of dropping out, then you probably haven’t fully considered other people’s reactions.†Isaac thought about that while we broke into a pan of staling cinnamon buns. “But I have considered the consequences. And I’m generally fine with breaking social norms.†He twisted off the tops of two cinnamon buns, switched them, and smiled.
Earlier that day I had watched Isaac leaning against the gate in the Mich house backyard, as the sun slowly set and the tendrils of smoke from a struggling dinnertime bonfire drifted upwards towards the sky. He looked young, but also determined – like within his clothes he was setting up a mold for the man he would be, a person that would solidify inside the jean jacket, the long-johns, the earring, the eyebrows that tilted upwards with sudden joy at catching a strand of creative thought. Meanwhile, graduating seniors Katie and Kat were causing a ruckus: like most of Ann Arbor they had been somewhat demented by the early spring influx of sunlight, and were standing on benches, hitting crumpled PBR cans into the air with sticks. As drops of months-old crappy beer/backwash pelted my forehead, I stopped thinking and started to laugh.
A periodic shaking off of my own persistent thoughtfulness might be kind of good for me. To quote the late David Foster Wallace, “probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education –least in my own case – is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in the argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.†Maybe I am ambivalent about academia, and maybe academia does structure my life, but I’m not ambivalent about life. I suffer no uncertainty about drinking coffee in the afternoon sunlight with good friends while listening to them improvise songs to the people across the street, no doubt about the bikeride with my sister before work, no hesitation about going to see that oddly named band at the weird venue with the new friend.
And abridging self-imposed routines can be as important as fighting back, with friends and coffee and music, against the suffocation of work and school. One of the first days of spring I was suffering through a run in the Arb with a sore Achilles tendon when I remembered something – despite the hurry I was in to get home, shower, and do my homework, despite the anxiety that if I didn’t get enough exercise I wouldn’t be able to sleep, despite the tiny numbers in the window of my ipod telling me that I had another forty minutes left in my workout, I did not have to keep running. I yanked my earbuds out of my ears, and as the tinny music stopped, abruptly my other senses returned. Half of the meadow had been charred in a controlled fire, and as the cool breeze lifted the remaining grass, the smell of burnt organic particulate drifted hazily in the sunlight. I wandered towards the swaying pine trees at the edge of the meadow, and laid down on a slightly damp patch of pine needles and clay soil – the ‘O horizon’ in the soil profile, I remembered dimly from an ecology class. As the leaves above me swayed and blued in the sunset, I sank through the soil horizons, trying to center myself somewhere within the bedrock. The sensation of falling off a cliff dimmed. By the time I stood up to walk home, I forgot about the numbers ticking away on my ipod.
David Foster Wallace couldn’t really tell me how to fight off springtime melancholy, and I couldn’t really tell you how. I think it has something to do with paying attention to the beautiful, organic strands of love (cinnamon roll, pbr, bike, bedrock) that weave their way through the seemingly impermeable boundaries of routine. I think it has something to do with understanding and remembering the relative impermanence of the academic thread, both in its greatness as an avenue to achievement and its dull everyday pressure. Maybe, between all the essay-writing, beer and coffee-drinking, running and studying, you should really just let yourself be demented by the sunshine, stop thinking, and laugh.
