One thing I’ve been in the process of learning for the past 3 years is to be a creature of the present moment. Last August, people asked me if I was excited to be going to Oregon and if I was honest, I answered that I was pretty invested in and present to where I was at the moment; spending a lot of time thinking about where I was going to be wasn't doing anything for the place I was right then. When the OE was ending in December, I asked (in my last memo) for everyone to be as present as they could be right up until the end, and I tried to do the same.
Now it’s February and I’m back in Philly at school. This is where I am, and if I learned nothing else from my transition from Mission Year into college, it’s that pining for the return of the past doesn’t bring it back. It only pulls you away from the one place that you have the opportunity to be at the present.
That being said, there are plenty of times I tell people I wish I was back in Oregon – back under the stars, back stoking Cabin 9’s wood stove and talking with people I love, back baptizing our absurd family of chickens with a cascade of rancid compost raining down on their feathered heads. It’s easy to wish all of that back. And I do miss it terribly. But I don’t think my heart is really asking for the Oregon Extension to return. I mean, I know it won’t, and I’m not holding out and refusing to make my home here on the chance that some miraculous opportunity to pack up and go back will arise. Still, there’s a large part of me that is reluctant to settle in where I am. The fact is, I don’t want to be content here.
The things that make me discontented are things that I think should be making me discontented. I’ve been disenchanted with a lot of things lately: the bigness and unavoidably dehumanizing nature of our global economy, the Almighty God of so many theologies and churches that ultimately teaches people to hate themselves, the busyness of my typical American lifestyle that’s chock full of commitments and appointments and devoid of the time necessary for rest, self-reflection (or any kind of holistic thinking), and agenda-free conversation.
Currently, I feel trapped in an educational system that doesn’t give me space to really study the things that I most passionately want to study. College seems to be created to (a)cater to students who haven’t been given the opportunity to discover what they really want to learn about and (b)keep them off the job market for at least four years.
I could drop out and read a ton of books, have conversations with a diverse range of people, intern at a handful of places, and come out on the other end having learned (and actually retained) a lot more theoretical and applicable knowledge, but I would be lacking that important piece of paper I get for coming to this place and reading third-hand critiques of Marx and spending class time taking tests to make sure I’ve done my homework. (Apologies for the painful run-on sentences.)
I’m being a tad harsh right now. Actually, I feel like I’m harsh all the time. I go to meals in the dining hall and look at the food, the catering corporation and the garbage cans with sadness, knowing it’s possible for people to tend their own gardens, buy locally from farmers they actually know, and compost more than what they throw away. I see majority white students on campus, observe the Black and Asian ones hanging out in mono-colored groups, cross paths with outcast gay students, and think wistfully of places where I know that color, age, sex, and orientation are better integrated, and all the better for it. I’m hyper-sensitive to the things people say that rub up against the new thoughts I have about God, and every time, I see how the ideas they hold so tightly to are wounding them just like they wounded me.
In response to all of these things that make me feel sad and frustrated and unalive, I’m a mad dreamer – and an optimistic one at that. I desire racial justice and gender justice and food justice; locality, less busyness, and more authentic, life-giving interaction; jobs that actually enhance self-worth, creativity and community-life. I dream of ways that these things could look and ways that I could actualize them with my own future, but at each stage of my dreaming I run up against walls that leave me feeling defeated and uncertain.
All of that to say, I don’t want to nestle down into Eastern’s happy structure too comfortably. Not having enough time to hold and ponder the things I feel most strongly about sets me on a continuous wave that crests in optimism and crashes down into pessimism, over and over again, and it feels like all I’m capable of portraying to the people around me is how bi-polar, dramatic and cynical I am. I’m kind of waffling around, trying to figure out where the balancing point between idealism and reality lies.
So currently, I am an overwhelmed college student, holding onto a lot of relatively new (to me) and not-very-popular ideas with pretty tightly clenched fists, afraid of what will happen if I open my hands. Opening my hands seems to be the only way that I can be present here, though. So I guess I’m trying to figure out how to do that, without betraying the things I’ve been feeling and thinking and experiencing lately. It’s a process, but a good one, I think.
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