"You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language," Rilke articulated in Letters to a Young Poet.
Welcome all to the beginning of a new academic year at Tufts University. For the class of 2008, this marks the beginning of your college experience. Last Wednesday a herd of proud parents grazed briefly on campus before dropping off their freshmen at the dorms. Others, of course, arrived early for a pre-orientation program to trek in the wilderness, volunteer for the benefit of urban Boston, or to bond with fellow international students and adjust to American campus life. But no matter when you hugged your parents goodbye in that quintessential Kodak moment, by now you have already completed your first week of college. The Great Beginning has begun.
Exciting as this sounds, it can also be a little scary. You are in a new place, undoubtedly trying hard to make new friends and trying even harder to prove yourself to these friends. You may feel disoriented, confused or just giddy. There are also the additional stresses of figuring out block scheduling, understanding the nature of having unlimited dining hall meals, and trying to meet this guy "Joey" that everyone keeps talking about. Everyday you call either your mother, your grandmother, or your girlfriend or boyfriend. Some days you call all of the above.
The good news is that, perhaps surprisingly, everyone else is in a similar boat. We are all, in many ways, just beginning. For the sophomore class of '07, you are finally no longer freshmen! Now marks the beginning of maturity and respect. For the junior class of '06, you are finally no longer sophomores! Now marks the beginning of maturity and respect.
Now for the graduating class of 2005, this can't feel like the beginning anymore, but it may feel like the beginning of the end. Many are asking: What have I been doing? Where did all the time go? What's going to happen to me next year? Who am I? Ours too is a picture of beautiful anxiety, one that mixes the clean brown and blue of our youthful immortality with the bleeding colors of the real world. And that too can be a little scary.
Because college often seems to be over altogether too soon, my suggestion is to step back every once in a while to see the bigger picture, heed Rilke's words, and remember that-in many ways (but certainly not all)-life has not yet even fully begun. We should take from this, I think, the following:
First, it's okay to make mistakes. You are inexperienced in the workings of the world, in the matters of life. So don't take yourself too seriously. We learn by making mistakes. Second, it's good to try new things - not like hugging the toilet all night, but like taking a class in an unfamiliar discipline, trying a new sport or activity, or meeting new people who are different from yourself.
Finally, as Rilke says, have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. This means that we should ask loads of questions and learn to love the questions themselves. Rilke also urges us against searching for the answers. In some ways this is insightful. We should not expect answers, say, in matters of passion or love - at least not yet. But he goes on to say that we must live the questions now. "The point is, to live everything." Therefore we must not confuse patience with apathy. We are being called not just to act, but to act mindfully.
Yes, we will search for answers. But at the same time, we can seize this moment of beautiful anxiety, both infinitely small and infinitely large, by identifying it as one moment among many others, one in which we are still so young, and so very much before all beginning.
Noah Trugman is a senior majoring in philosophy.
