Once was enough

So many bright, young, hopeful faces! 

As I walked across campus this morning -- one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation -- I luxuriated in the relatively calm and relaxed ambiance of the summer quarter.  Plenty of summer college students, but in nowhere near the numbers seen during the normal academic year.

More noticeable than enrolled students were their even younger peers, kids gathered in groups, or walking with parents, or out on their own -- singly or in pairs.  They're recognizable, even apart from their obvious youth, by the excitement and curiosity on their faces. 

Who are they, I wonder?  Most, perhaps, are newly admitted students, already visiting the U Dub to get oriented for fall quarter.  Some may be the happy beneficiaries of "thick envelopes" from several colleges -- doing a little comparison shopping before making a decision.  Many are still younger -- high school or even middle school students -- brought by parents or as part of school groups.

Do I envy them?  Of course.  I envy them the way I envy a traveler I see setting out on a new journey.  So many experiences lie ahead; so many interesting things to learn.  And, of course, I envy their unthinking confidence that a nearly infinite number of days and years lie ahead of them, time to accomplish all their dreams, time to waste if they choose, with infinite time still to spare.

Would I trade places with them?  A difficult question, because I recognize how their apparent bliss can deceive.  Recall what it was like to be 18 years old.  Or 22.  Yes, you had the entire world open before you, and seemingly limitless time to work your will upon that world.  But what was it you wanted to do?  And how did you go about doing it?

I struggled with these questions longer than most, but they are questions most of us struggled with to some extent.  The curse of having heard teachers, year after year, speak of your "great potential."  But potential to do what?  How does an 18-year-old assert the self-control necessary to focus on a single objective, when he can't decide whether the objective is worth the effort required to attain it.  Or whether he, whatever his perceived "great potential," has the actual ability to attain it.

Especially, now that he finds himself in college and surrounded by clever classmates, most of  whom also have "great potential."

My fear -- and I suspect most of my classmates' fear -- was that I would totally fail to live up to that "great potential" -- in the eyes of others or, even worse, in my own eyes.  I was haunted by the words of Holden Caulfield's teacher, in Catcher in the Rye:

“I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. . . Are you listening to me?"

"Yes."

You could tell he was trying to concentrate and all.

"It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know. But do you know what I'm driving at, at all?”

Oh, Holden knew what he was driving at, all right, and so did I.  He was attempting to draw a picture of the secular hell of wasted lives, the hell to which young guys who didn't live up to their "great potential" were presumably assigned.

I know better now.  That hell exists, all right, but a little indecision and fumbling around at the age of 20 doesn't suffice for perdition.  There are second acts in American lives -- sometimes third and fourth acts, as well -- despite what F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us.  You can explain that to a college-aged student, and he may understand you, and he may even agree.  But he agrees with you theoretically; he agrees with you insofar as what you say applies to others.  For himself, if he is the worried sort I seem to have been, he foresees only a One Act Play, one chance to get it right.  He may grant himself an extra year or two beyond 22, but if his career isn't well on its way by the age of 25 -- he sees himself flipping paper clips across an office at best, or more likely living unemployed in his parents' basement -- or in a cardboard box.

So, no.  I've been there once.  That was enough.  When we say we wish we were 20 again, we mean we wish we had young bodies and many years lying ahead.  But we assume that we would know then, in that second childhood, everything that we know now.  That we would know we were about to make the right decisions and enjoy reasonably successful careers and lives.  You give me all that, and sure, I'd go back and do it again. 

I wouldn't dread the hours of study, the writing of long term papers, the studying for tests, the tolerance of intolerable roommates.  Those were the easy costs; now they sound almost fun.  But it's the psychological stresses resulting from an almost existential fear and uncertainty and self-doubt that I'm not willing to experience again.  When I consider those particular stresses, I agree with singer Maurice Chevalier when he sings:  "I'm so glad I'm not young anymore."