How many times, walking across campus, have you encountered “that girl from the other night”? How many faces have you seen so many times that you feel like you know them without having ever spoken to them? How many stories have you heard about people you’ve never met?
Fortunately, Whitman College is a tight-knit community filled with familiar faces. Unfortunately, however, Whitman College is a tight-knit community filled with familiar faces. Allow me to explain.
There is a certain comfort that accompanies a small, intimate community. You never feel out of place, there’s always somebody to talk to and it’s easy to feel involved on campus. But there is also the inevitable stagnation of familiarity, the feeling you’ve met everyone worth meeting, that you have somehow exhausted whatever social resources you were given upon coming to college. Fortunately, the solution is a simple one: Get out.
Not because Whitman is a bad place, not because there is anything inherently wrong with a close-knit group of people, but because you need to see new faces sometimes, because you need to break free from the scrutiny of rumor, because people inevitably need a change of pace.
You don’t have to go far and a bike will suffice if a car is not available but the crucial aspect to this remedy of nauseating frustrations is the change of scenery for which you pedal or burn those fossil fuels.
This is in no way a commentary bashing life here at Whitman. To say that I haven’t had a great time here would be utterly wrong and this is meant rather as a commentary on intimate communities in general. The fact is, there is a feeling of paralysis that familiarity breeds in people over time, a feeling that you are unable to escape people you would rather not see and a feeling that your mood is seemingly controlled by some insidious campus-wide Overmind.
A few friends and I recently took a trip to Portland over the course of a weekend. The drive was surprisingly palatable and being in a real city, if but for a few days, was refreshing. There are a number of things to do on the Whitman campus and in the greater Walla Walla area. However, this supposed number of things is actually not terribly high and there can be no denying that Portland or Seattle each have a differing appeal of infinite opportunity. There’s something expansive about a big city that a tight community lacks and, for the very reason that living constantly in a big city can be overwhelming, the tight-knit community can, over time, seem underwhelming.
The city is the change in scenery I personally crave when I leave campus, but for others, a trip to the mountains could suffice: camping, travelling anywhere just for a new setting and a new set of possible experiences. This is not specific to Whitman, and those who have grown up in small towns could undoubtedly attest that the occasional diversion from a set of all-too-familiar norms is refreshing and serves in renewing an interest in those norms via a brief departure from them.
These negative feelings are not by any means pervasive or common, and, in fact, occur rarely and only after prolonged exposure to the allergen of intimacy. In fact, the effect of a good trip to the mountains, to any more expansive and perhaps less alliterative city, is the equivalent of a reset button. You shake the cobwebs from your system and return to Whitman in a mood that allows you to, yet again, appreciate the closeness that brought you here in the first place.
