The week after I returned home from Australia in June, I was obsessed with prospect of returning to school in Colorado. As much as the lush blanket of leaves sheltered me from the parts of Wilton I wished to avoid, I craved waking up to the humbling behemoth, Pike's Peak, every morning and watching the setting sun illuminate her pink granite as I ate dinner at The Preserve. I yearned for the invigorating discussions that would arise in my classes about the Ludlowe mine strikes or the distraction of the Balkan Wars away from the feminist movement in Serbia. And the monkey in me twitched in withdrawal from climbing onto roofs with my friends at night.
When I finally moved five duffel bags of clothing, outdoor gear, and miscellaneous stuff (for lack of a better word) into my 9'x11' room, I felt as though my life had reset to where it had ended three months prior. Yes, I had stories from my travels in Australia and from my hikes in Connecticut (check 'em out here), but I fell in love instantly again with Colorado College and the community it has fostered. I was no longer an ignorant freshman searching for people to eat dinner with, but rather a sophomore with a full grasp on how to navigate the school and the area with my arms linked tightly with those of family.
My first class, Nature & Society, offered a means by which I could compare side by side my drastically disparate lives in Connecticut and in Colorado. I don't mean compare in terms of the physical landscape or the type of people, for those are obvious differences that I could've laid out before I began at CC; instead I know have a more philosophical means by which I can understand my life, my mind, and my actions.
Prior to the French Revolution, philosophers, scientists, religious leaders and the general public regarded nature and society as in order. Ecosystems fueled themselves in, as Aristotle describes, a cyclical, infinite manner. People ascribed any catastrophes or anomalies in the course of nature, particularly climate, to the will of God; He simply was punishing the people for their sins, but not in an uncontrollable, overly-chaotic manner. Machines, in particular the clock, erected during the Industrial Revolution granted humans the ability to harness to a certain extent the chaos of nature, thus establishing a more routine lifestyle without as many risks for famine, food shortages, etc. Then finally, with the Scientific Revolution, members of the scientific community like Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Keplar, and Newton established universal laws of science that deemed nature predictable and confined it to certain patterns of behavior.
Then, with the breakout of the French Revolution in 1789, the concept of order dissipated into one of disorder. Such a drastic upheaval of a longstanding monarch and an all-powerful bourgeois class shook the Western world like an earthquake, breaking down the foundations of their society. The middle class rose and the bourgeois class fell, drastically reducing the economic and social gap between the two. Since then, humans have consciously lived in a world of unpredictability without God as an excuse for the social and environmental pressures. Through the 20th century, the consequences of our ethic of exploitation began to directly interfere with our lives, whether the Dust Bowl or air quality in large cities. These events challenge that ethic and the idea that some higher being created nature for man's sole benefit, thus giving rise to environmental awareness and the conservation movement.
My 19 years of living and the transitions that have occurred throughout it mimic those of the past 2,000+ years of Western history in terms of moving from order to disorder. That sounds worse than it is. Actually I don't regard it as a negative thing at all, but rather the wonderful reason why I am sitting outside looking at the first snows on Pike's Peak.
My life in Connecticut was always a routine. Wake up at 7:30, get to class by 8:15, trudge from class to class seven times, go to soccer practice, do homework, sleep, and find sometime to eat within all that. I designed my weekends around more homework, more soccer, and maybe some recovery. In establishing such a rigid routine, I convinced myself I had every aspect of my life under perfect control. I had a scientific formula for how to perform at my peak in both school and athletics, and would attribute my failures to an input of incorrect data. Similarly to how people exploited nature without bounds, I exploited my body and mind without bounds, exhausting it beyond a tipping point.
But then my own earthquake occurred junior year that fractured my whole self. Chaos had rudely and unexpectedly entered my life just when I needed peace to apply for college. I tried to uphold the order in my life, and convinced myself for a while that it was still there, as I would have expected members of the bourgeois to have done. A year or so later though, the relentless mass pressing down on me split the fracture wider, and I was forced to accept the inevitability of a disorderly life.
And that turned out more than okay. The floor of my room at school is never without a stray jacket or three pairs of shoes. I only do laundry when I'm forced to due to a lack of athletic shorts. I never do homework in the same chair or place two days in a row. I efficiently power through my homework so I can be with friends instead of getting the sleep I should be. And on the weekends, I bounce from place to place, activity to activity, without any sort of boundaries confining me to a schedule.
First block this year was a perfect example of that. To begin, I became News Editor of the independent school newspaper. That in itself is a fireball of chaos, especially on Thursdays when we spend seven hours at the publishing house finalizing that week's paper. But weekends were (and will forever be) the real thrillers. Second weekend, I went cliff jumping in Paradise Cove, sharing beers and urging people to make the leap of faith that aren't as willing as I to fly weightlessly into the water. Third weekend, I saw Lotus in concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater, woke up at 6 AM to go skiing on a glacier, jump off a 50 foot cliff into a lake, go to a 100+ person party in the woods on top of Mount Hermon in Monument, and proceed to work for nine hours on Sunday on a research paper on the development of French Cuisine for Nature & Society. It may seem like I never take a break, but I now thrive in constant, spur of the moment, ridiculously absurd adventures.
I don't think I regret my past life, for I think if I had not experienced it, I would not bask so much in the glory of this thing I call life. So that leads me to ask why people, why I, have strived so hard and pushed away so many opportunities in order to find a false sense of security in stability. Why schedule your life around societal formulas when your holistic success is never dictated by a set of irrelevant numbers?
If you're not convinced now, just wait another month when ski season starts.
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