September has finally come - and in spite of the collective groan expressed by the local Medford/Somerville population, the light on the hill is once again being rekindled. The new academic year has begun and emotions are pulsing through the throng of newly arrived students like panic through a school of nervous fish. And this with good reason; so many new experiences await them. There will be new friends to meet, new professors to dread, new parties to flock to, new strangers with whom to mingle sweatily in musty basements, and much more.
And yet with so many emotions running high during these first few weeks on the hill, one would be hard pressed to find even a handful of genuinely homesick Tuftonians. This is not surprising. After three long months of working a seven dollar an hour summer job, fighting with siblings for the car, and being treated like a 15-year-old by parents, most of us are more than ready to embrace our long-awaited independence.
But as the first weeks pass and endorphins begin to slow to a trickle, new students feel the first pangs of homesickness. Dewick's Aztec-rubbed chicken (though delicious) just is not the same as mom's casserole, the cinder block walls seem cold and claustrophobic, and the couples who got together at orientation begin to suspect that they may not actually be soulmates. With time, this homesickness passes. Students begin to form a group of close friends, they settle into their rooms, they even find themselves referring to Medford as "home." But in the absence of the former conventional homesickness, there often comes a deeper, stranger homesickness - one that does not pass quite as easily.
Zach Braff's character, Andrew, speaks of this homesickness in the movie "Garden State": "You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff, that idea of home is gone...You'll see when you move out, it just sort of happens one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist."
I first experienced this during my freshman year at Tufts. Even though I had settled in and formed a group of close friends, I didn't feel like I truly belonged either in my room at home or in my double in Houston Hall. This was a more existential feeling of unbelonging, a deeper sense of loneliness in realizing that I yearned for something that nothing I knew could satisfy. I longed to know the truth about myself and my world. Who was I? Why did I exist? Was what I had experienced all there was to life?
Though many experience this uncertainty, most choose to ignore it. Many try to crowd it out with their busy lives, relationships, or social noise. Some succeed and become contented with a life about as deep as the wading pool on the Boston Common. And yet some choose to follow their strange longing's leading, seeking answers to the difficult questions.
In my first year at Tufts, my homesickness led me to Tufts Christian Fellowship - students who had gone through a search similar to mine, and they claimed to have found what they had been looking for. They found it, they said, by following Jesus together. I decided to stick around for a while, and in time, I was transformed. I found my home and joined together with others who were journeying there by following the only one who could satisfy their homesick longing.
