We had a looong break. For some of us, it included travel: a NOLS trip to the Himalayas, service work in Appalachia, visiting family in Mexico. The respite from academia did not function as such for the diligent students who stayed on campus or at home. There was little rest for those weary academicians who spent much of the break toiling over superheroic theses, or calculating seemingly endless data for independent studies designed to make Connecticut College a more inclusive, educational and enjoyable place. A few of us were lucky enough to find paying work in our oddly-timed five weeks off – and some of us even worked on securing (dun dun DUN!) more long-term employment for the post-Conn world.
However we chose to spend these last weeks, for those of us who will graduate this May, something has come to an end. This may well have been our last winter break ever, at least of such length. Instead of beginning classes on January 25 with the usual blasé, just-another-novel-semester, oh-hey-old-friends attitude, we seniors were faced with reality in the harsh light of an class-wide e-mail. “As of yesterday at 11:00 AM,” it read, “you are officially 17 weeks away from your Commencement Ceremony.”
An unceremonious marker of one of the first of many lasts.
So, Class of 2010, as we count down to the big 5-2-3, celebrating 100 days, 50 days, please contribute financially to the college days, let’s think about how we think about these things – these momentous milestone markers of modality, this confusing carpe-the-semester crap. We all know one another. Whether merely on the level of a Harris nod of recognition, or in a deeper connection of late night carousing and healing at Norm’s, many of us have, in a way, come of age together in the context of Camelness.
It’s a connection Vonnegut might call a granfalloon, but a 750-acre, tangible, meaningful connection nonetheless. So please, let us not judge one another on our coming employment statuses – Deutsche Bank, TFA, couchsurfing, whatever. That is not who we are. We are too intertwined, nurtured side-by-side by our Honor Code, individualistic and cohesive for that false oversimplication of what we know in our friends and classmates to be complex, and beautiful.
I hope that instead, we’ll take this last semester, this seeming ending, and run with it. Dance with it. Right into each other.
Decked out in our finest Peacock Feathers for senior gatherings, or perhaps even our birthday suits (on at least one enchanted evening). That we’ll honor and remember those we’ve lost, and make plans for our own lives to fulfill goals they will not be able to. That the Class of 2010 will achieve the humanistic goals of enacting a liberal arts education in the real world and blah blah blah, and that we’ll remember this place with more than fondness. More than hazy memories. We came in with President Higdon, and we’ve seen a heckuvalotta changes over the years – and, I hope, been changed ourselves, and cracked a bit more open.
And maybe the experience of going to Connecticut College is only a first of many in our lives to let us be fortunate enough to do that.
