PrintCall it stoicism, or zen: Without the right attitude, the petty annoyances of college life feel like heavy burdens.
It was a beautiful morning in early September, my third day of freshman orientation. I had been exploring the farther reaches of campus with a new friend, and as we were walking down the path back to the Van Am Quad, she suddenly stopped and pointed to a rowdy pack of children playing on the grass. As is true of most excited four-year-olds, they looked as much like bear cubs as human children: running, grabbing, and otherwise rolling around with abandon. Normally the cynic in me would have prodded, asking where all the childlike wonder in me had gone. But that day, as a new first-year, filled with excitement about all the wonders of the college experience, I felt I had more in common with the playing kids than I did with the worn-out and jaded high school senior I had been the year before.
As the days turned into weeks, and school got into gear, though, I began to feel the familiar pressure of performance I so dreaded before—offset only by a sense of intellectual newness. Instructors challenged students to perform above their former benchmarks, and my classmates were all as sharp as, or sharper, than me.
As the weeks turned into months, I once again began to feel tired, achy, and mournful of that blissful interregnum summer between high school and college when I could say, just a little conceitedly, “Yeah, I go to Columbia,” without the slightest idea of what that statement meant. The tension became a buzz in my head, the buzz a murmur, and suddenly I was complaining—complaining about long lectures, about useless sections, about distant professors and abstruse exams, and all the more so because everyone around me was, too. If Columbia didn’t have a Latin motto, its English one would be, “Misery loves company.” The unfolding beauty of late summer had wilted into the dissatisfaction of an early, bitter winter.
I did not realize the changes—they came so gradually that I hardly noticed that my mood was souring at all. But then one day in late November I was plodding to Kent when I saw the same group of small children on the tree path on College Walk. They were just as vibrant and as kinetic a bunch as they had been in August, though their thick winter coats and mittens made them waddle more than run. “Same old bear cubs,” I chuckled to myself, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that I had stood in that spot before: not as a student, but as a little kid in a puffy coat and mittens, waddling a decade ago.
It was a winter night and my family was visiting Columbia. My Mom said to me, “Joseph, you’ve seen the trees, right?” I shook my head. We stopped, and she looked left. I followed her glance and there I was, at the Amsterdam Avenue Gate, speechless before an alley of white lights. The shining bulbs hanging from the trees were like low stars suspended near the ground. Enthralled, I ran among these trees. I twirled in place, arms out, and let the lights whirl around me. I was surrounded by galaxies and nebulae and dark matter clouds and black holes; I was going at warp speed to visit distant worlds (you can tell what sort of fiction I read then).
And there I was again, eight years later, standing in front of carousing, carefree kids. The day suddenly seemed a little bit brighter then—my former childhood wonder had returned to me. When I lose some of my lightheartedness to Columbia’s stress, I remind myself: Don’t let your day-to-day cares take away from the wider worth of things. Don’t let your vision of this place become mundane. Remember what it was like on your first day here. Remember what it was like to see something with fresh eyes. Let yourself be a little kid in a puffy coat and mittens, waddling.