Reflections on Freshman Fall
I feel like I'm obligated to do this for posterity. Undoubtedly, I'm going to want to look back a year or two from now and understand that I had come up with a couple of takeaways from Freshman Fall.
That doesn't make it any easier.
How am I supposed to summarize my first term? Maybe I can start by talking about what it was. A jump into the deep end that is not-home, a censored introduction to the real world with the screen of pseudo-adult supervision for reassurance, the time to go crazy and be stupid, the time to get serious and begin the real work. One thing's for sure: Freshman Fall was a lot of contradictions.
But is that necessarily a bad thing? This past term has challenged me to resolve a lot of questions. These questions helped me find patterns with my own behavior that I otherwise wouldn't have expected to be so aware of.
The simplest example of this boils down to a simple question: what do I really enjoy? By the end of the semester, a couple of things were clear to me: I love eating, dancing, and white boards. Go figure.
For posterity: interpret this. Your halfway-through-freshman-year Avi is going to try to express exactly what he feels at the end of Freshman Fall.
You're at a train station. A gust of wind fills the vacuum that was left behind by the leaving train. Or was it arriving?
A bunch of leaves draw your attention close by. Green, red, yellow, orange, brown, there's a fierce spectrum to be found. The leaves are dancing with each other, sharing in the cacophony of nervousness, excitement, and wonder. Even though they've just met each other, they seem to have been friends for forever.
The sun keeps getting covered and uncovered by clouds, a fickleness that alternates between blinding you and darkening your surroundings. It's a bit chilly in the Northeast, so you're more than glad to have the sun warm you and more than sad to see it go, but you definitely didn't expect the switches between light and dark to cycle quite so quickly. It's almost as if your emotions mirror the presence of the sun; who knew you could switch so quickly between highs and lows?
It's snowing now. A tray, a snowman, a crowd of naked people running through the cold and snow, all of these disparate elements seem to replicate the surprising amount of things that happen on a daily basis for you. Your education has sharpened your ability to draw connections; what links these three together Avi? Just the snow? You've learned quite a bit, but you can do better. You will do better.
It's nighttime now. The wind skims the top of the waves of white, blowing glitter into the air, a whistle in the background. It is strong tonight, blowing more and more of the sparkly dust into the air with an intensity that you hadn't experienced before. There's energy in the dark.
You stare until morning, when the sun hits the pale sand dunes and sets the ground ablaze. Turn around, and you see a bridge spanning a river, the water a similar blinding gold. Look to the ground, and you're standing on it too.