The wheel turns, the seasons change, and the circle closes.
I’ve arrived at my senior year. One more year, in which I will disseminate my admissions advice (if you can refer to the various ramblings, musings, and experiences I’ve chronicled as a Jumbo Blogger as such).
As the second full week of classes winds to a close, I find myself logging longer and longer hours at various desks located in quiet areas around campus, with noise-canceling headphones on my ears and a work-induced scowl on my face. Given this trend, I thought it would be a good time to put down some observations and a few lessons I’ve learned. Perhaps this, if nothing else, will be something I can come back to and bear in mind through my senior year.
I decided to imagine this post as what I would write if I was given the chance to slip wee freshman Joe a note. The bold items are what I would write on the card; I wouldn’t write all of this because we only really learn when we fail, and freshman Joe had a great many mistakes to make.
1. Life is a poorly stirred mixture of good things and bad things, and that’s okay as long as we learn from the latter and live for the former. When I arrived on campus in September 2011, I lived in Tilton Hall. It’s a small all-freshman dorm nestled at the very bottom of the hill, across from Haskell (another all-freshman dorm) and very close to Bush and Lewis Halls, as well as Dewick Dining Hall and Hodgdon Good-to-Go. This block formed the core of my freshman year, but nothing was as important as the friends I made on the second floor of Tilton. Leaving Tilton was hard, but I was convinced the friends I made would be the friends I had throughout college and for life.
I was both right and wrong. Some people who I considered friendly acquaintances ended up becoming very dear friends, while some people who I counted as dear friends wound up drifting away from me (usually due to some combination of circumstances and mistakes on both ends).
On T2, though I didn’t know it, some of the people who I wasn’t particularly close to would end up being some of the most caring, most loyal friends I have ever had. If I bumped into the freshman version of me one of these days, would I tell him all of this?
Of course not. But I would tell him that it gets better, that one day soon he’d be walking past his freshman dorm on the way to his senior one, and he’d marvel at how far he’d come and how many people (who had no reason at all to help him, and in fact had reasons many times to do the opposite) were kinder to him than he ever deserved.
2. The more something hurts, the more important it was. It has been anything but smooth getting to this point. As I alluded to above, I lost friends and learned to appreciate the consequences of my actions. I’m still doing my best to work through those mistakes, and learn from them to better myself, every day.
But never run from something because of how much it can hurt you. Time heals all wounds, and time burnishes all memories. It is the mistakes that have hurt me the most that I remain the most grateful for, in every area of my life. Those are the mistakes that defined me and continue to define me, and the lessons we learn at our lowest are the ones that are engraved into our souls.
What we’re scared of isn’t pain. What we’re scared of is being broken. But it is when you pick up the pieces that you can see—and begin to fix—cracks in the very core of who you are. And it is when you’re broken, when you ask for help with real humility, that help comes from places and in ways that will move you more deeply than I can express.
Failing makes you smarter. Failing catastrophically can make you wiser, if you let it. Make your mistakes. Love recklessly. Leap before looking, over and over and over. You will succeed at times, and you will fail at others. Either way, you will be made better.
3. In college you meet all kinds of people and see and have all kinds of interactions. No matter what someone ends up meaning to you, good or bad, be grateful for the lesson. You’re probably noticing a recurring theme: learning.
Most of the people who read this, I imagine, will be either current students at Tufts or students considering applying. Either way, you’re all very bright and academically gifted. What I’m referring to is learning from others. Throughout life, as I’ve learned at Tufts and will continue to learn beyond, nothing is ever settled. If you’re on top of the world one minute, you could be free-falling the next. If you’ve hit rock bottom, before you know it you’ll be back on your feet with a newfound appreciation for everyone around you. Through it all the best thing we can do for ourselves is to keep trying to absorb lessons.
My dad is a quotation machine, and one of his favorites is “learning from your own mistakes is intelligence. Learning from others’ mistakes is wisdom.”
Do your best to be wise. But wisdom has two parts: wisdom itself, and good humor. Never assume you can’t make a mistake because you’re smart or anything else.
4. People believe in you. No matter who you are, where you come from or what you aim to do, more people than you realize believe in you. It took me a hell of a long time to realize it. It’s not just parents. High school teachers, college professors, family: many, many people stand behind us without our ever knowing it.
But there’s one thing to understand: no one expects perfection. The people that believe in us are, more often than not, older and wiser than we are. They know perfection is impossible, and they’ve made mistakes of their own. I have had to actually be told this multiple times, and I’m afraid it hasn’t sunk in all the way yet, but it’s still something that’s become clearer and clearer to me over the last three years.
We are, all of us, the sum total of many lives, many hopes, and so many prayers. They can be the whisper in our ears that helps us get up when we fall, and they can be the wind beneath us when we fly.
5. Passion + eloquence = charisma. Life is never easier than it is when we follow our passions. I said a long time ago in another blog post that what Tufts’ motto, Pax et Lux, means to me is simple: internal peace sheds external light.
And we are brightest, and most at peace, when our hearts aren't stifled by our heads. What we connect with in others isn’t subject material; what we connect with is passion. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ passion to have, no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ face to show to the world. There is only what moves you, what incites real emotion from you, and what doesn’t. It doesn’t matter if it’s sports or fashion or gaming or the Internet. What moves you will move you. Don’t fight it.
I’m going to call it there for now. It’s amazing how I’m all of 21 years old, yet in writing this I made myself feel like an old man. Although, to be fair, in college years I’m entering a gentle brown and blue twilight.
Thanks for reading, everyone.