Eye of the Storm: Winter Break
Posted by Aaron on Sep 2, 2007
My winter break was atypical. On December 14, 2006, the day after finals were over, I wasn’t at home. I wasn’t sweater laden, sipping hot cocoa, and thumbing through department store catalogs. Nay, I was on a plane headed for 21¬∞18‚Ä≤32‚Ä≥N 157¬∞49‚Ä≤34‚Ä≥W (or Honolulu, Hawaii).
I am lucky enough to have had an adventurous college friend who could do nothing but answer the call of our 50th state. So, my last final ended at 5:00 p.m. and by 7:00 a.m. the next day I was on my way, via Denver, to Hawaii. It was the best idea I have ever had. But this blog entry isn’t going to be about pineapples, SPF, and the challenges of maintaining composure on three squares of airline food. Rather, there is something about being tightly packed into a metal tube for 12 hours that induces reflection, and there was a lot to reflect upon.
While sitting there at 30,000 feet, I thought about all the events of the past semester. I thought about my professors. For the past four months, I had had an almost adversarial relationship with them. In a fit of militarization, I had been arming myself with the knowledge I would need to defend myself. Then, when diplomatic talks ended without a consensus, war broke out in the form of a final exam. “Remember your training, put some angles between you and your pursuers. Evade and survive, and we will bring you home.” – Admiral Reigert (played by Gene Hackman), Behind Enemy Lines (2001). Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad.
In any case, whatever animosity I had towards my professors, for putting me through that ordeal, evaporated the moment my pen formed the last punctuation mark on the last line of my last essay for my last exam. It was the moment when anxiety turned into blissful ignorance. Sitting on the plane, I realized that the first semester isn’t a war, but a crucible. I wasn’t fighting the professors for the upper hand; I was fighting myself and the preconceived limits to my own abilities. That being realized, I felt a sense of gratitude for all of my professors. They had pushed me to study longer and harder, and think more critically than ever before. Better than I was before. “Better,stronger, faster. [They] have the technology.” – Six Million Dollar Man (Opening Narration).
Oh, and Hawaii was good, too.