Amidst

Here they call first-year students “freshers,” and we just finished our freshers’ week. It’s quite like the orientation we did for undergrad, but I enjoyed it more this time. There are fewer compulsory talks on the basics of how to live and study in a university — well, we are postgraduates now — and more social events to help people get to know each other and the place. And they are mostly voluntary. I have felt the welcoming vibe from the college, which is made better by the fact that the organizers of the events are older students rather than staff, but I’ve also been given the chance to settle in and do whatever I need to do on my own and at my own pace.

It’s been an enriching week, not for the activities necessarily, but for the people. From the first day I arrived and met Joel who helped me pull the heavy luggage to our house, to that night at the first Welcome Party meeting many more from our house (Hisaya, Ben, Desmond, Tobby, etc.) and my course in linguistics, to the next night chatting for over an hour with Caroline and the other girls, to our college tour, Cam tour, lunch at Market Square, pouting trip, to Chapel evening and walk to Granchester (where I talked with Emma about her family and Andrei about the MCR), to matriculation talks and tea and cookies at the lawn, to the night group hangout with fresh baked cookies and chocolate candies in the kitchen of Flat D…

What I’ve enjoyed most is the chance to talk to people. You meet so many people here that you can have a reasonably good conversation with, on either academic or other topics. You can hold a glass of wine in a crowd trying to mingle with others and pump into a biologist who then tells you about his PhD research topic in a nutshell that leaves you totally bewildered. You can also sit down at the dining table and chat about English dialects in people’s home countries or education and mental health. I’ve met far more international students than British ones. I’ve met people from all fields of studies — those who study consciousness and pure math live next to those who study engineering and law. The diversity is amazing. Even more so than what I encountered in my American college.

Maybe because of the diversity, and the fact that postgrads are a bit more mature than undergrad freshers, there seems to be less of a division. People listen, and inquire, and engage in topics you are interested in. And most of them are awfully nice. Nice in the sense that they are pure-hearted, friendly people with a curious mind. As postgrad students we are adults but not quite there in the world. We sit around a kitchen table and rank different brands of chocolate candies we have in hand. We are curious about each other’s accents and what that tell about where we are from. And we laugh over silly things.

The culminating event was the formal dinner last event. The weather wasn’t as good as the day for matriculation, when we could sit on the lawn and chat over tea and cookies. Yesterday was freezing with a fairly heavy rain, so the graduation photo and the academic conferences in the afternoon weren’t as pleasant. But the formal dinner — a tradition here for new students — was a wonderful and special experience. Everyone was assigned seats in the buttery, students at the normal tables and graduate tutors and MCR committee at the high table. Before sitting down we stood in a line and listened to the choir Grace. Then the dinner started, with one course after another, all the food carefully prepared and presented. Everyone had a name card on the table, together with plates and cups with the college logo on them. The wine was Fitz brand too.

Not trying to brag — well, maybe I am — but there was a sense of wonder in that formality, which I did not expect to enjoy but actually did. You are carrying on a tradition. You are part of an institution that has sent away many accomplished scholars in their fields and is now welcoming us, another diverse group of newcomers. Not that we will all be successful in what we do, but this year, this moment of being here together, learning, living, enjoying each other’s company and the exposure to so many great minds, is something worth celebrating in itself.

We toasted, standing under the beautiful ceiling of the hall, to the past, present and future of Fitz, and to the year forward.

In the BOP last night — the name for dance parties here I guess — we danced quite wildly. I had rarely enjoyed dancing in college, feigning some moves with two or three girls I barely knew while seeing couples grinding or making out not far from us. But yesterday was quite a blast. It was good to dance with people you’ve gotten to know quite well over a week and see familiar faces in the group. There were some quite good dancers. The two Indian guys, for example, definitely livened up the energy of the group. People were having fun, just dancing. That’s what I love, just dancing.

This feeling of being inspired and invigorated by the new is familiar. I experienced the same thing at the very beginning of my time at Middlebury. Having gone through that I know the challenge comes later. The challenge comes when you finally leave an engaging conversation after hours of talking and return to your small, dark room, having to face all the tasks you have to get done, and the invisible sense of pressure and competition behind the pure friendliness and niceties on the surface. To the fact that you have things, people, memories left behind, and you don’t know what is the right way to relate to them now. You don’t seem to have time, but you do need, or want to reach out to them. But how? How to remember my life beyond this — an ivory tower or a bubble — how to live with and live between the overwhelming wonders from the outside and the layers and layers of complexity we carry inside?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I continue to struggle every day, every time after I come back from a class, an event, a dinner conversation. Being with myself is the hardest task of all. I’ve come to the conclusion that I really just need to do what I need to do, and not care so much about how I feel. Feelings fluctuate. Feelings can be misleading. They can give good guidance for big decisions but in day-to-day life sometimes you just need to let it go and live. Because that’s all there is. That’s what all these myriads of opportunities and experiences come down to — the only way to cherish them is to live them, and be aware of though not too affected by how they make you feel. The outer world is overwhelming enough. When the inner world is equally so, the mind and body become a volcano, just waiting to explode.

The good always comes with the best, doesn’t it? This amazing week has shown me how challenging it will be to juggle many different things on my hand in this coming year. It’s good that it’s difficult. To learn to live with difficulty and try to find ease — which, hopefully, I will find eventually — is the purpose of being here.

I’ll stop here — another day of the new and the old and struggles and peace.