Tibet

Somewhere in the mountains of Tibet I forgot how fast life can be.  It was either the macaque monkeys making valiant attempts at capturing my lunch or the ethereal mist that hung over the monasteries dotting the cliffs, but perhaps both were instrumental in helping me lose my complete sense of time. I remember thinking then that despite what appeared to be my total departure from life at home, in a few short months I would be back in Middlebury surrounded by those who also had made the seemingly impossible journey from the ends of the earth back to the figurative center of it all. I remember that while excited for whatever lay ahead I also dreaded again facing the very things that had originally driven me away to a land of monkeys and mountains. And yet it felt like merely a short breath had gone by when I found myself back at Middlebury. Having lost my sense of time long before my return, it was pretty easy to feel lost.

For one, I returned to find a Middlebury College that physically in many ways did not resemble the home I had stored in my brain as a reminder of my roots. A new building had come to life, a construction site that magically had become a center of liberal-arts life. In that building, a room where time appeared to be playing a joke on itself as first-year fiddled with their new iPods and Blackberries under the watchful eyes of Julian Abernethy (a reference I hope you alumni get).

But while time had brought on the birth of the new, time had caught up to those who tried to outrun it. A dining hall, familiar to all those who are proud to call themselves Middlebury graduates, fell to the chopping block, or as Matthew Biette, head of Dining Services, might say: to the tools of the plastic surgeon. However in its place students now go to a dining hall able to restore its legacy as the provider of all things delicious (read: fried), given of course that enough care has been taken to restore its rightful personality at the same time that it caters to students not looking to gain the “freshman 50.” Indeed for someone who has completely lost their sense of time it is easy get lost when trying to appreciate the death of old things that felt new and the birth of new things that feel old. Not to mention as a senior it is difficult to imagine planning for years that have ones in the tens column.

To be a little less cryptic, the campus has undergone a huge amount of change, even in the short time that I was gone. Proctor, long a safe haven to many is now open to no one (albeit temporarily) and the school is now sporting a shiny new center for environmental studies (Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest) and a renovated center for humanities (old Starr Library now called the Axinn Center).  For those that try to have a sense of time passing on this campus, with so many changes going on its certainly a little unsettling.

Although, because I am learning to face this time crunch I also have come to appreciate all that time has given me just by ignoring it. Perhaps what I have learned the most is in no way do things here move linearly. Time has a way of skipping ahead of itself and even doubling back on its progress in order to catch up to where it needs to be. What I mean is that as a senior I am capable of watching the clock all the way to 0, I have so much more control over how I let time dictate my life that by losing a sense of time things rely on me getting them done and not the passing of minutes.

And it is with that sense of knowing one’s own control, in which I am often happy to tell people that although I would have wanted to let the death of time happen, I feel the need to spare it; at least for just a little longer. At the very least till I decide time and I have come to an agreement on how it’ll treat me and how I’ll treat it.