Nostalgia & Quiet Salvation.

We are a generation of busy. Of motion. Noise. Multi-tasking. Keyboard clicking, Cell phone vibrating, overstimulating, quickly moving time. We answer emails while we listen to music, talk on the phone, and look up the rotten tomatoes rating of that new chick flick at Bowtie Cinemas. We walk to get Starbucks while we text our friend, glance over a final paper, and make sure we didn’t forget our keys. Yesterday was August 28^th, 2007, the day I schlepped all my crap up a flight of stairs in Bingham tower into my freshman dorm room, excited and anxious and sweating.  And today May 29, 2011, I wear a ring on my right hand with the year "2011" and "Yale University" engraved on its surface, marking me an official Yale alum for six whole days now.  The papers and coffee and exams, late nights, great friends, hard classes, shitty weather, castle dorms, Harkness bells, Commons lunches, Atticus dates, bubble teas, chick flicks, Kappa retreats, study breaks, late night Walgreen’s runs, drunk Yorkside visits, alcohol stashes, Vivas nights, dining halls, manuscripts research, Sterling studying, crime report emails, panlist spaming, all you can eat Samurai sushi, reading responses, classesV2, work-study, car honking, 2 am conversations are over.  They handed me my diploma, I took my seat, and all the tethers, what had held and pushed and pulled me through Yale, severed.  But the pace of my life stayed the same. I was sprinting in place, now inches off the ground.

I got home and read to avoid the realization that I have no true conception of my present.  I ran on trails so the distraction of picking each new place to put my foot would keep me from thinking about all the answers I don’t have. I am floating. Waiting for whatever comes next with no push or pull, just the gentle breeze of my own free will suggesting a direction.  I have one long term goal, as vague as it could possibly be. I want to help people.  But I don’t know how or in what way.  That’s all I’ve got.  It wasn’t so scary before.  It was exciting not to have the answers when I had so many other things to do.  It’s a beautiful thing, and a frightening one, being tied to nothing but an idea about a way of life. 

But I can’t make lists about a way of life.  I can’t schedule every hour of my day on my iCal, set an alarm, text the other people for help who are trying to get the same things done…for an ideology.  I can’t comb through the library stacks looking for books to give me the answers to my personal creed.  I can’t write a paper about it, complete a problem set, go to a professor’s office hours, take an exam, get a tutor, work with a friend, Google, make a list, call my mother, take a coffee break, or sleep on my life doctrine. Everything I know about making progress, moving forward, accomplishing something, is inapplicable. I have no Dean or Master or friend to point the way.  I sat at home with my wheels spinning, the cogs turning a million miles an hour hoping to somehow touch ground and take off in a direction, any direction.   But I hung there, frantically flipping through my book of Yale tricks, pulling everything out from up my sleaves, hoping I had missed something that would help me now.

Mom and I drove to Karonoko for the weekend, a family place in Maine that was bought in the early 1900s by my great grandfather.  As we drove down Nickerson Lane with the windows down, the cool sweetness of woods and water filled my nose and I felt everything slow.  As we rolled to a stop and I opened the door to the Maine twilight, everything went quiet and still.  My clock, racing ahead at full speed through my life and ticking loudly as a reminder of its passing, stopped. My floating feet finally touched ground and stood strong and steady in the place where time stops and noise is silenced.  The smell of the trees, the cool breeze off the lake, the lapping of the water against the shore match exactly the background of every summer memory I’ve had in my life.  I’d finally arrived at my dependable, constant, sacred home, and I could breathe again.