Once school gets out we will finally have time to notice what we’re filling ourselves up with. Last night you filled up your head studying for finals. This morning, cereal. Rehearsal. Lunch. Chem final. An afternoon pit stop for e-mails and yogurt parfait.
I can never remember the end of the school year. This is why. We’re all doing so much there’s no boring time to just sit and digest it.
My mother is visiting; she’s in awe of our campus life. She sees students walking, meandering, biking with books or with friends or in Whitman cycling team spandex, moving across campus in every direction. Like fish in a tank, she says. (Should I be offended? So our campus trees are the algae, the library maybe some model ship where busy fish groups congregate.) My mom sees students sprawled on red couches in Reid, so wrapped in thought we don’t notice that someone is seeing our world. “What are they thinking?” she wonders.
What are we thinking?
I’m thinking about things inside the tank. I’m thinking about my Fridays at 4 concert, wanting it to be good for housemates and friends I begged to come. Gauging how much time I can spend reading e-mails. Worrying about saying proper goodbyes. Catching glimpses of campus crushes. Smelling the lilacs. How can such small things add up to make me feel so busy?
A great thing happened in Don Snow’s class last week. For a class that normally discusses small things, Don brought in an essay called Forget the Whales––Save the Earth that ran in the LA Times on Earth Day. In this essay, Hal Clifford writes that environmentalism is dead. Cleaning up beaches doesn’t matter if glacial melting will flood them anyway. My class transformed–instead of dissecting sentences we plunged into global issues. What would happen if people took Clifford’s argument seriously and gave up on small-scale efforts? What does it even mean to act on a global level?
We talked about what’s happening outside the tank. We left behind our Whitman pond for an ocean of environmental politics and global warming propaganda. It felt good to think about.
It renewed my faith in small things, too. That class full of people who care about writing can jump into a big discussion about what’s happening on the globe. Don still believes in the efforts of small groups of people with localized issues; I believe all this small stuff we fill up our heads with on campus has its place in the bigger picture.
I can’t wait to have time to sit back and think about where the spring has gone. I like what Thoreau says about processing thoughts: that by documenting what we’re thinking about, we can see our thoughts in unified patterns and turn the page instead of repeating old processes. Once school’s out, we’ll have time to digest and turn the page to bigger things: global warming, graduation, summer.