Week 1: Youth, or Why We Should All Act Like Freshmen

The activities fair glows with bustle, with wide-eyed freshmen and phosphorescent idealism raining down upon the whole of the crowd at Davidson College.  One two-hour shift where any and all things are possible, where people can get lost into their dreams and commit the cardinal sin of indulging their whimsical fantasies of what their life would be like if they did Crew and Ada Jenkins and Ultimate Frisbee and Mock Trial – before their life actually hits and their imagination succumbs to the near-dogmatic work overload that turns a freshman into a bed-ridden octogenarian with dementia by October.

I soak it all in from a distance, remembering those days when I was in their shoes, scurrying around with my new friends and crushing on every P.Y.T. that ever invited me to come talk to them at their table.   I wonder why college can’t be like the fantasy I had imagined as a freshman.  Why do all the upperclassmen I know have to approach it with such harried cynicism?  Why can’t we be sent to one eternal loop of the first week of my first year, where I met my roommate, met my friends, and met a girl all at the same time?  Isn’t that feeling we all want, the feeling of freshness, of living life anew, basking in the attention of everyone trying to court us to this and that opportunity, knowing we can’t take everything but signing up for it all anyway like a carefree kid picking daises in the open field?

I drove down from Richmond to Davidson, NC, last Friday, to enter into the portal of my Junior Year of college.  The whole way, I was singing country songs.  “Unforgettable” by Thomas Rhett was on repeat, the country crooner singing about the moment when he met his beloved.  I remember distinctly the moment I turned off the interstate into a North Carolina cornfield, the first one I had seen in three months.  It was in that moment when I felt distinctly awed.  The leaves were brushing me by on this one-lane county road with a dinky old gas station propped up to my left and a long winding dirt path to my right.  My windshield was clear as the daylight screened out over the horizon, just me and the road and the New 103.7 – Country’s Hottest Hits – streamed in my car.  Free and Easy Down the Road I Go.

YAF was at the top of my mind, of course.  Over the summer I had worked for YAF for three months, and I wanted desperately to take everything I learned and cake it over campus like a large pie.  I feel so invigorated about YAF – but more importantly, I feel invigorated about the freshmen.  The newly orientated fresh fish, still open-minded in the most genuine of terms, open-minded and needy, needy for the principles that YAF would bring onto them.  I feel confident I have the best team I’ve ever had in my entire life.  I feel big.  I feel like I can really make a difference.  It’s times like these when I have to turn to God for my smallness, and yet I feel like He has empowered me to make a change, to cut through the chaff of this school’s politically correct culture and speak truth to power.

I’ve always been a guy motivated by my ability to make a difference.  If I can make an impact, I will attack at it with all my passion and all my heart.  The first day I was back, a senior approached me at the Union gym.  He told me what I write online inspires him, because I tell the truth, even if it’s unpopular.  Today I was told the same thing, from another student, who said that she could tell that no matter what I said, I could be confident that I am not sinning here, because she knows that I’m coming at it from a place of love.  How beautiful, how wonderful is that?  I feel the need to shout to my Creator, “God, I don’t deserve this.”

I feel young.  Like I can fly.

I’ve resolved this year to stop overanalyzing things.  To stop worrying so much.  I think Davidson culture is way too conducive to worry and frustration.  Last year I got sucked into that mental framework.  I took every situation I was ever in with a girl I liked way too overboard.  My friends would describe the “Kenny face” to me with jarring precision – me, splayed out over a couch, look up at the ceiling with my eyes glazed-open focused at nothing apparent in the middle-distance, overthinking, overhypothesizing, underdoing.  You know what that made me feel?  Old.  Paralyzed.  Unable to move and unable to move on.  This week I made a conscious decision to change that.

Maybe I am simply enamored with the newness.  Maybe I am searching for something that I can’t have – youth.  But it is ironic how we college students are in the prime of our lives and yet still feeling so old, so weary, so lost in our own problems.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  Not every day is going to be two hours at the activities fair – but maybe, it’s time for we old upperclassmen to take a page from the optimistic idealism that defines our first week.  To go driving down the cornfield, breeze in your hair, not a worry on your mind.

 

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